Dear the City of Chelsea,

It’s not to say I’m outraged or offended by your trash pickup requirements, I believe I’m more confused. Why do we have to buy your orange colored trash bags? Why do we have to put our completely normal household trash bags into your thin orange bags? From these questions I have 2 main grievances about your system(not that I don’t have more). First is the fact that it takes up extra time every week to re-bag up all of my trash, and second, is the price of the bags.

Usually, it takes me up to 10-15 minutes to collect all the trash from my house, and then re-bag everything before taking it to the curb for collection the next morning; it could take half as much time if I didn’t have to re-bag all of it. From my experience (living in a family of 4 with 2 dogs) each orange bag holds about 2.5-3 household bags so I’m only using 1-2 orange bags per week, sometimes three if we have a big project during the week that makes extra waste. I get how this makes the garbage personnels’ lives easier by only having to pick up 2 bags at each house, but the price for these trash bags is just ridiculous.

The reason you have people buy these bags is to fund the waste disposal program right? I get that, but In no world is there a reason to charge this much. Before the most recent markup you were charging $25 for 10 bags at any local hardware/resource store; $2.50 per bag. This is already extremely expensive for a thin plastic bag. However, you recently increased that price by TEN WHOLE DOLLARS! So now I’m paying $3.50 per bag that I’ll use 2-3 of a week.

What I don’t understand is why we’re not allowed to use 42 gallon black industrial grade bags from Contractors Choice(or similar brands), that don’t tear apart every now and then(for no reason or have little applied force), and are way cheaper with a cost per bag of $0.65. The price advantage to allowing citizens to switch to these other trash bags is that they get 50 trash bags for $3 less than your price for 10 orange bags. In order to charge OVER 5 TIMES as much for your bags they must be outstanding right? No, they’re not. They’re smaller, more fragile, flimsier, and harder to keep open. I have no hard feelings, after all it’s my dad that is paying for the bags, I’m just truly curious as to why we have to use the city’s orange trash bags that make our lives so much harder. It makes no sense.

Sincerely,

Victor