My thoughts lately have been a bit trashy.

More specific I’m at a loss to decide whether to take the “freebie” and switch out my 32-gallon brown cart for a 64-gallon cart or to hold my hand, so to speak.

I have no doubt the City of Manteca has to change what it recycles given the market conditions for recyclables are beyond their control. But I’m not sold on the city’s numbers — or mine for that matter.

Assuming the City Council tonight blesses the second reading of the ordinance change that will allow the city manager to suspend the $51.75 cart switch out fee for 90 days I will have a limited time to avoid that charge should I decide I won’t be able to jam all of the items that I once could place into my 32-gallon blue cart into my 32-gallon brown cart.

It’s been three weeks playing by the new rules and my brown cart has been put out once when I smashed the contents as tight as I could to get it in and still get the lid down, another week it did not require smashing but simply pushing  down on the trash bags, and the third time it was just a matter of tossing stuff in with no extra effort.

If I did not have a second person living with me this would be a no brainer.

Should I pass on the “freebie” exchange I may save $51.75 on a switch out fee and avoid a $1.80 a month increase which is how much more a 64-gallon brown cart would cost. That’s $21.60 more a year.

But if I don’t take advantage of the 90-day window and things don’t work out I’ll be stuck with a $21.80 a year increase in my solid waste costs plus be out $51.75 for a future switch out.

Part of my hesitation has to do with the change in emphasis the city is taking in dealing with what goes into the blue cart. 

The City of Manteca was recycling before. Now we are collecting. In reality, all the city has ever been doing is collecting. They’ve never recycled anything per se as that is a task they leave to the firm they contract with to take the recyclable items they collect off their hands.

This is not a simple case of semantics.

Manteca and all other jurisdictions in California must comply with state mandates.

The problem is in the numbers. Based on what the city charges for the three different brown cart sizes — 32, 64, and 96 gallons — it is costing roughly $1.80 for every 32 gallons collected to landfill. That means roughly $26 of everyone’s monthly solid waste bill goes to cover costs associated with collecting the brown, green and blue carts.

If a quarter of the households in Manteca switch to larger carts — 2,000 going from 32 to 64 and 4,000 going from 64 to 96 — the city will realize an annual increase in solid waste revenue of $124,300 a year. Yet the city is eating $310,800 by waiving the $51.75 switch out fee assuming 6,000 households change cart size. There are economies of scale in mass deliveries. At the same time the city will be able to reissue medium-sized carts that are turned in for exchanges for the large carts. That takes care of the 2,000 32 gallon carts being switched to 64 gallons. But if 4,000 current 64 gallon cart customers switch to 96 gallon carts those larger carts will have to be purchased. The best price online excluding shipping is $160 for a 96-gallon cart. Given the city buys in volume the cost is cut down to around $100. That means the city is spending $400,000 on carts it did not include in its budget.

So if only 6,000 exchanges are made, the city will be incurring $710,800 in costs it did not budget. One should assume the revenue from the increase in solid waste bills due to carts being super-sized will go to cover the cost of landfilling items the city once collected for recycling that are now being put in the brown garbage cart. That means it won’t help offset the $710,800 cost the city incurs from switching out 6,000 carts.

I’m not saying don’t trust the city but if they’re incurring $375,000 a year in unexpected costs because they are now forced to landfill everything they were collecting in the blue carts due to changes in the recycling market, it would seem — based on the $710,800 hit they’re taking in switching carts — that they would have 23 months to get another solution in place whether it is working toward shredding organic waste as fertilizer or some other option without being any worse off.

I know, everything is do-able on paper but reality is a different animal.

It’s just that if down the road three or so years Manteca comes up with a solution that allows items being banished from the blue carts to again be placed in them and/or food waste and paper being placed in the green carts with yard waste for shredding into fertilizer, your brown cart volume need will diminish. Rest assured that the city at that point will not waive the fee so people in large numbers can switch out to a smaller brown cart.

This, in a sense, is all academic because the city — whether it is avoiding fines tied to not meeting state mandates or trying to reduce the high cost connected with landfilling items — is not in the business of recycling or collecting for that matter. It is driven by the need to be solvent while providing a basic need — trash collection.

At the same time even though many of us are adherent recyclers our bottom line is driven by money.

Should the council for a variety of reasons call a timeout tonight and press to visit other options to see what can be done with what is collected in the blue carts, rest assured they will fall back on a highly paid consultant that would likely add another $100,000 or so in cost.

My first impulse is to sit tight.

But in doing my best to reduce garbage I create and such, there’s a good chance I will have to switch out carts down the road which means I’d incur a $51.75 switch out fee.

So I’ll go with the option that saves me money in the short term even though it won’t do much for reducing the waste stream and opt for the free switch out to a larger cart. In other words I’ll do what the city is doing and go for what is likely the least costly option  upfront and not the one that’s best for the environment or even long-range cost cutting. I will now have double the garbage volume I can toss each week. Given I used to fill the blue cart to the brim each week before I stopped putting in items that the city now can’t turn over to a recycler and that I also am not tossing in a big space eaters in the form of California Redemption Value (CRV) containers, I will have room to spare in my brown cart. That means I could backslide when it comes to looking for ways to reduce trash.

The city essentially is undoing 25 plus years of recycling habits by spending some money to avoid short-term costs instead of embarking on a long-term solution. And the city’s action is prompting me to do the same exact thing.

So much for waste not, want not.

This column is the opinion of executive editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Bulletin or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA.  He can be contacted at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com or 209.249.3519.