Your bin may soon receive a monthly score

Under the draft, every household container would carry an identification chip and every collection lorry would weigh the container as it lifts it. The waste fee would then be split into a standing charge, a per-kilogram element and a third line, described in the annex as a sorting quality index, derived from periodic sampling of what the recycling container actually holds.

The index would be expressed from 0 to 100 and printed on the reverse of the quarterly invoice, next to a small bar chart showing the street average. A single greasy pizza box in the paper container would be enough to move it, which is accurate, since a single greasy pizza box is in fact enough to downgrade a batch of paper. The ordinance is not wrong about the waste. It is only slightly unusual about the invoice.

The consequences would land on the pavement at six in the morning. Collection day is the one weekly ceremony at which an entire street appears simultaneously, in dressing gowns, carrying evidence. Under the draft, each container would broadcast its identity to the lorry, and shortly afterwards to the neighbours, who would already know the street average and would be able to do the subtraction.

“No household would be penalised,” the municipality would state. “Households would be priced accurately. We understand that from the pavement these two things look similar.”

The scheme would work best in exactly the housing where it is least needed. A detached house with a garage has room for four containers and a garden for the biowaste. A 42-square-metre flat has room for one bin under the sink, and the score would measure floor area at least as precisely as it measures virtue. In blocks with a shared container the arithmetic fails altogether: the pensioner on the fourth floor would receive the same grade as the ground-floor flat where somebody new moves in every month.

The predictable behaviour would follow within weeks. Bags would begin their commute — to public litter bins, to the container two streets over, to the office. The drafters have anticipated this with lockable lids, a small key per household, and a clause governing unattributed deposits, which is the ordinance's term for a bag that appeared in your bin while you were asleep and is now on your invoice.

Nothing has been adopted, and the council would describe the text as a discussion draft. The chips exist, the weighing equipment exists, the fee structure exists in other countries and the software to publish a league table has existed for twenty years. What is missing is only the decision to print the number on the back of the bill.