In the coming months, Falmouth will begin auditing the trash that residents put on the curb for pickup, checking that they are using the mandatory yellow trash bags. The effort to reenforce the use of the bags follows the Feb. 10 Town Council discussion of the anecdotal and hypothesized lack of compliance with the yellow bags in Falmouth.

Falmouth’s waste disposal is a pay-as-you-throw program that requires residents to purchase yellow bags for their trash, with the revenue from bag sales funding the cost of trash collection by Casella Waste Systems. Following the switch to an automated waste collection system in 2023, which no longer entails a person checking that the trash is in yellow bags, Falmouth saw a 10% decrease in the purchase of yellow trash bags as compared to the previous year. At the same time, the volume by weight of trash collected in Falmouth increased by 7%, leading some town councilors to believe that more households in Falmouth are putting their trash in the collection bin without using the yellow bags.

“I can’t drive by now on trash days and not notice the barrels that are overflowing with trash and not a speck of yellow in them,” Councilor Sean Mahoney said on Feb. 10.

For the trash audit, town staff or hired personnel will go in front of the trash truck on collection days and check that the trash carts’ contents are in yellow bags. Households not using yellow bags will be identified, and their trash will not be collected that week. According to the town’s announcement, subsequent trash violations may incur additional penalties, as per Falmouth’s Code of Ordinances.

The goal of the audit is both education and data collection, said Assistant Town Manager Maggie Edson. The town hopes that the audit will serve to reenforce the necessity of the yellow trash bags in the pay-as-you-throw system and also inform the town on the levels of yellow bag compliance across the community.

The exact timeline for the audits will not be released to the public, to avoid artificially and temporarily increasing compliance during the audit period.

“We’ve heard from other towns that when they’ve announced ‘We’re doing audits this week,’ then everybody complies, and then two weeks later, they go back to not complying. So we’re kind of hoping to do it in an unannounced fashion,” said Edson.

The discrepancy between the increase in trash and the decrease in yellow trash bag purchases has also left a hole in the town’s trash disposal budget. In FY 2024, Falmouth saw a net loss of $186,644 in the program. To address the shortfall, Town Manager Nathan Poore proposed increasing the cost of the yellow bags by 50% over the next two years, bringing the cost per large yellow bag from $3.54 to $5.54.