Waste is a terrible thing to mind.

Neighboring houses in Colorado Springs are often served by different waste-hauling companies. Some residents never give it a second thought.

To Leslie Patterson and other residents in the Patty Jewett neighborhood, having a different garbage truck come through every weekday began to take a toll and drove them to seek a simplified service.

“Money was an incentive for people, but really it was the reduction of trash trucks,” Patterson said. “Every time we’d have rain or a snowstorm, we would get these huge divots in the alleys, which people were getting tired of.”

Like many Colorado cities, Colorado Springs does not own a waste processing facility or operate a city division for collecting trash. It is up to residents to pick their preferred hauler among private companies.

At a neighborhood meeting last summer, Patterson voiced her concerns about the impact of having so many trash pickups and mentioned consolidating the work with a single company. She said she was surprised to hear how many neighbors agreed.

“When we had that meeting and I saw that overwhelming response, I did not know that everyone was thinking about this the same way that I was,” Patterson said.

She reached out to a local company called Infinite Disposal. The company’s leaders met with residents and agreed to establish a neighborhood pickup program late last year. The company grew a pool of customers who live close together and gave the residents a slight break in the noise and wear from garbage trucks.

The neighborhood agreement continued even after Apex Waste merged with Infinite. Both local waste companies offered some version of a neighborhood program for a few years and now serve nine locations across Colorado Springs.

“It’s grown very organically from the Patty Jewett area. People are finding out how they are doing it and taking the prompting to ask about putting it in their neighborhoods,” Apex Waste General Manager Jeremy Weber said.

In the last year, the neighborhood program extended beyond the strict boundaries of the coordinated Patty Jewett area into a larger region, stretching west toward Interstate 25 and south into the Middle Shooks Run area.

The “neighborhood” covers more than 700 homes, and Apex sales coordinator Melissa Stutzman estimated that up to 80% of them are Apex customers. Anyone who lives within those boundaries receives a discounted rate of $18 per month for trash pickup and $5 a month for recycling.

The company needs to have at least 100 participating homes to create a neighborhood program, Stutzman said.

Apex can also vary the details of the neighborhood agreement depending on what residents care most about. While some areas are looking for a better deal, Stutzman said other neighborhoods want to improve their recycling or need help removing cut trees while doing wildfire mitigation.

The idea is getting an expanded push across the city through an Indivisible Colorado Springs environmental task force. The group held a promotional event Thursday afternoon to support the wider adoption.

Indivisible organizer Graeme Cloutte and other members performed a short skit about the issues caused by the number of garbage trucks servicing one area, followed by a more serious discussion with former City Councilmembers Richard Skorman and Yolanda Avila about the benefits. The goal was to start a discussion, not force a change on neighbors, Cloutte said.

Patterson admits that it was easier to coordinate a campaign like this in the Patty Jewett neighborhood. It’s a section of Colorado Springs that gives gift baskets to people who move in and holds frequent community meetings. She said other neighborhoods that might want to set up a similar program may need to start by finding ways to get residents talking.

Cloutte said he planned to pitch the idea to his neighbors near Bear Creek Park during a block party later this summer.

“If someone likes their existing carrier and doesn’t want to change, there’s nothing that would force them,” he said. “But the experience seems to be that people are very receptive to this.”