I love the concept of Pay-As-You-Throw for solid waste disposal in Newton. It is environmentally virtuous, economical and is fair to its users. When our Citizens Advisory Group recently recommended this, I was excited — until I saw that it was proposed in the context of increasing city revenues, and not for the environment. By charging for it over and above what we currently pay for our solid waste program, I fear the CAG will doom this important environmental approach to failure.

PAYT is a simple concept — using specially labeled garbage pails or prepurchased bags, each resident pays for what they inject into the wastestream and pays nothing for what they don’t. Our present system, which allows residents to dispose of anything they want for “free,” imposes little economic consideration on whether we should create and dispose of waste. The cost of our personal wasting is carried by taxes levied across the entire city population. Without PAYT, “wasting less” as an abstract virtue; with PAYT we add a strong financial incentive.

Most municipal PAYT programs combine a unit fee for garbage disposal with unlimited recycling. The net cost of recycling is lower than the net cost of disposal, so cities save money when they convince citizens to move something from the garbage pail to the recycling bin. In municipalities with PAYT, this causes three things to happen, two predictably and one quite unexpectedly. First, we have less garbage. Second, recycling increases. Both of these things are earth-friendly as compared to placing everything into a landfill or burning it.

But here is the kicker for the environmentally minded: After PAYT is introduced, in town after town that uses it, the total weight of SWDW (my acronym for “Stuff We Don’t Want,” aka the combination of garbage plus recycling) also drops dramatically. Brooke Nash, the branch chief for the Municipal Waste Reduction Program within the Mass. Department of Environmental Protection, recently compiled data for five Massachusetts cities and towns that have PAYT programs. She found that the total tonnage of SWDW for Attleboro, Dartmouth, Longmeadow, Marshfield and Shrewsbury dropped by 24 percent after PAYT was introduced. This ranged from a 13 percent reduction in Longmeadow to a 38 percent reduction in Dartmouth.

Tom Daley, Newton’s commissioner of the Department of Public Works, oversaw a PAYT program in Duxbury before he arrived in Newton. He says that the reason for reductions in SWDW is simple: When people are directly assessed the cost of disposing, they modify their behavior and throw away less. People reuse, resell or donate objects they might have once discarded. And they are more mindful of what they bring into their homes and consume.

There are many variations for implementing PAYT. Some communities pay for a baseline of collection via annual taxes and then charge per bag for waste over that limit. Some cover the entire cost of PAYT via bags or garbage pail stickers purchased at local stores. The size of bags and the size of bins vary. If Newton institutes PAYT, we can design it with details that work for us.

Critics of PAYT worry about illegal dumping. However, research from PAYT communities around the country does not bear this out.

Local critics argue that unlimited garbage disposal should remain a “free” benefit in Newton. But why? “Free disposal” artificially prevents a compelling market force from affecting our behavior for the better. We accept this market influence in nearly everything we do, from our consumption of water to our disposal of sewage, from the electricity and heating oil we burn to the minutes of our cell phone usage. Our economic system is built on personal choices driven by financial consideration.

Newton residents will pay $6.8 million this year for our conventional solid waste disposal and recycling programs. In most communities that initiate PAYT, program costs switch from a tax-based to a fee-based system, and the total cost stays the same or drops slightly. But our CAG states that by creating a PAYT program in Newton, we can generate up to $6.8 million in new revenue. We’ll do this by assessing PAYT fees on top of the present cost of our solid waste disposal and recycling programs.

If we introduce PAYT this way, here is what our citizens will hear: “New program, environmentally friendly. Oh, and it’s going to cost you twice what the old one did. You’ll still pay taxes for it, and you’ll pay fees, too.” You think our voters will embrace it?

Unless our tax rate is reduced to reflect the fee charged for PAYT, this fee is simply an override without consulting our voters. Without a tax offset, this move injects local money politics into sound environmental policy. By doing so, it undermines this policy.

A healthy debate can be had about PAYT rubbing up against our sense of convenience and entitlement. Let’s have that debate on its merits. In my own view, we should implement PAYT for the sake of environmentalism and fairness. We can all debate revenue raising and overrides, too. But let’s do that in a separate conversation.

Steve Siegel lives and works in Newton. He gets his news online, and recently cancelled his daily paper to reduce his SWDW placed for weekly curbside.