Good Grief!

Philadelphians are probably familiar with the city’s various marketing tactics to make sure residents comply with recycling laws. For example, there’s Curby, the cartoon recycling bucket, and Officer Friendly, who warns that refusal to recycle could result in a $30,000 fine (Curby and Officer F. are on the city’s old recycling website). According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, however, sanitation inspectors stopped issuing tickets because too many residents called and complained about the $25 fines.

So why bother to have laws if people can make them unenforceable by whining to City Hall? And all of this happened four months after Philadelphia started a 3 million dollar advertising and educational campaign to encourage recycling:

“We went from Officer Friendly and enforcement, to talking about why it [recycling] is a good thing to do and trying to engage the public in why they should do it,” Tolson [Philadelphia Streets Commissioner] said. “We offered more of a carrot instead of a stick.”

Carrot instead of a stick? Yes, this is the city that loves you back, but it’s also the city that throws batteries at baseball players and snowballs at Santa (apparently, he had it coming). So maybe we should give that stick thing a try and reinstate the fines.