Seattle, Whatcha Gonna Do When the Trash Police Come for You?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Have you ever been in one of those contests in which you try to guess how many jellybeans are in a jar? It turns out to be pretty hard, and belongs to a set of problems broadly known as “Fermi questions.” There’s some math you can use, some of which is relatively straightforward (calculating the volume of a cylinder with V=πr2h) and some of which (calculating the volume of an irregularly shaped object such as a jellybean) is quite a bit harder. If you wanted to make the problem even more difficult, you could add some wrinkles: Say you don’t know how many different flavors of jellybean are in the jar and that the flavors are mixed in irregular portions — how confident would you be in betting money on what percentage of the jellybeans in the jar the combined sum of Island Punch, Piña Colada, and Sizzling Cinnamon (to rely on the canonical Jelly Belly catalogue) constitute?

What if getting a wrong answer made you an outlaw?

The geniuses who govern the city of Seattle have passed a law mandating that no more than 10 percent of the garbage produced by any household, multifamily dwelling, or business be composed of material that is recyclable or compostable. At the moment, violators are receiving warning tags on their garbage, but in January they’ll start receiving fines. The fines are not really punitive — at $1 per violation for individuals and $50 for businesses, they’re more a form of harassment.

Naturally, you’re wondering whether Seattle’s city fathers have sent the city’s garbage men to a seminar on solving Fermi questions. It is, after all, the trash-collectors, along with a team of special agents tasked with running down composting violators (one wonders whether that is a red notice or a black notice on the Interpol system), who are empowered to make judgments about the constitution of trash hauls and to issue fines. Strangely, this is not the case; those familiar with such training as has been undertaken to meet the challenge of outlaw garbage have been told, essentially, “Use your best judgment,” and try to visually divide any given quantum of garbage into tenths. This approach to the non-compost menace is non compos mentis.

Our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation are doing what they do best, which is taking boneheaded, overreaching government agencies to court to force them to mind the law at least, if not good judgment. Pacific Legal is one of those little platoons in the liberty movement that do good work day-in/day-out without much in the way of drama or acclaim, but if you value your freedom — freedom from cozy crony-capitalist licensing regimes, freedom from illegal bureaucratic meddling, freedom to pour beer from a growler — then it is an organization worth taking note of.

Pacific Legal’s case against the Seattle garbage Gestapo is two-pronged: For one, the Washington state constitution contains privacy guarantees in excess of those secured by the Fourth Amendment, and the state’s supreme court has already ruled that police officers cannot search through a private party’s garbage without a warrant. Second, there is no avenue for challenging the findings of the city’s garbage police, no appellate process for adjudicating disputes about the contents of a Hefty Steel Sak. If you suspect that your local garbage agent has misjudged the proportion of stale Froot-Loops and moldy quinoa in your domestic waste — even if you can prove it — you have no recourse.

“There is no way to call them to account,” says Ethan Blevins, a fellow at Pacific Legal. “Residents lack any means of challenging the guestimate. However laudable recycling or composting is, the state constitution puts clear limits on government’s abilities when it comes to enforcing these laws with regard to privacy rights. ”

“However laudable” brings up a good question. There is no evidence that this sort of household-level recycling (as opposed to mass automated recycling in industrial facilities) actually provides any meaningful environmental benefit, once all the involved energy expenditures are accounted for. Progressives are forever preening about their commitment to science, but curbside recycling is little if anything more than ritual.

The good people of Seattle ought to think twice before giving up their constitutionally guaranteed privacy rights in order to satisfy the liturgical requirements of the Right Reverend Moonbeam Birkenstock and the Holy-Rollin’ Compost Choir.

The progressive mind has an addiction to phony precision: Seattle’s 90 percent recyclable-free garbage, Barack Obama’s $2,500 average reduction in annual health-insurance premiums, Paul Krugman’s serial predictions of an imminent euro collapse (eleven of them by Niall Ferguson’s counting) based on the very best and most precise economic data, pretty much everything Vox has ever published, etc. The euro is still there, and health-insurance premiums have gone up, rather than down, in the Obamacare era. If Seattle wants to enact a 90-percent standard, then Seattle should be made to enforce a 90-percent standard — i.e., the garbage cops should be made to weigh the garbage — rather than rely on guestimates.

And if Seattle wants to make garbage guestimates for the purposes of prosecution, Seattle should get a warrant.