What one town learned by charging residents for every bag of trash

They were charging a flat rate ($240/year) for households to buy a sticker to dispose of as much waste as they wanted. The town was losing money and was concerned about doubling the annual price, as it would disproportionately affect low-income and smaller households, so they started charging $65/year plus per-bag of trash. This lead to a decrease in the amount of trash being discarded so that their municipal refuse program is now breaking even instead of losing something like $65k/year, and it costs smaller households significantly less than if they had doubled the all-you-can-discard sticker.

That's my summary, but the full article is a quick read and contains some interesting details.

(Edit: corrected a typo)

They do this since one year locally and it really feels like your municipality hates you. And I hate it too. Sometimes the garbage can is not opening, but it has already scanned your waste-card. That's a very expensive empty can. You think I want to call to dispute the charges on my goshdarn garbage bag? Also, The price per bag is NOT mentioned on the can, only that it will cost ya money.

This system makes it so throwing your garbage from the window is the cheapest option. Which is what folks are doing now. If you make it hard or expensive to do it the right way, folks will do it the wrong way. (2,39 euro per 60L bag of garbage. If you only throw away 13 bags a year, you break even with last year's cost.)