This, if you will, is a tale of two garbage systems.

One is the City of Manteca.

The other is a private contractor with San Joaquin County serving a segment of rural South Manteca and the rural Tracy area including the San Joaquin River Club just across the Airport Way Bridge.

Waste Management is launching three-cart service next month.

It covers a 96-gallon cart brown top for garbage, a 96-gallon cart blue top for recyclables, and a 96-gallon cart green top for organics/food waste.

Just like the City of Manteca, the county wants you to place out the organics cart each week for collection regardless of how full it is.

It has everything to do with rotting food/organics, insects, and smells that get worse as it gets hotter.

Unlike Manteca, however, the County is not burying its recyclables.

Technically the city isn’t either because many things like newspapers, magazines, general paper and such aren’t accepted.

Nor is glass and non-corrugated boxes such as cereal and similar food boxes as well as things such as shoe boxes.

The city, besides clean flattened cardboard, does take No. and No. 2 plastic containers (milk and juice containers), empty metal cans plus CRV plastic bottles and cans.

One assumes the contractor the city is supposedly working with it actually would take more recyclables assuming most of us can follow the rules and if the city actually bothers to enforce the rules.

Also, they hopefully aren’t burying CRV containers.

I put my blue cart out this week for the first time in a month. There is easily 40 CRV containers worth $2.

Given there are 30,000 households with a lot more people living in them than in mine, it’s a safe low-ball estimate Manteca as a whole is tossing out $30,000 plus a week in CRV containers.

That’s based on an average household tossing 20 CRV containers a week.

If whoever the city contracts with can’t make a go of it on close to $1.56 million in CRV redemption then Manteca needs to rethink how it is doing things.

There clearly is a market for clean corrugated cardboard.

As for CRV bottles, that’s a given.

If the contracted firm can’t pay people on an hourly basis to separate items and no one else can, maybe it needs to come in house.

Heaven forbid; it might even provide gainful employment for those transitioning off the street.

What is not acceptable is the fact in-country recycling has been pretty much a lie for decades.

And even with the state mandating landfill diversions while making it hard for industries to spring up in California to recycle the trash we create; the city no longer can simply throw up its hands.

Manteca needs to make this work.

They are charging households $50.92 a month with more annual rate hikes on the way.

On the flip side, your City of Manteca solid waste bill for three months without the city actually recycling most of the time is $162.76.

Compare that to $213 for three months Waste Management will start charging next month to run a collection just like the City of Manteca’s that is considered the best practice in terms of meeting state solid waste goals in a — dare I say —- cost effective manner.

Waste Management is currently charging $132 every three months for one cart service that goes the way of the dodo bird in mid-May.

So if you were a rural and not a City of Manteca resident a month from now you can take confidence the County is doing it right even though you are paying $74 a month.

If you’re a Manteca resident the city is basically doing it wrong and burying your recyclables most of the time but you’re paying a lot less at $50.92 a month.

The city is not without options.

Plus they have a fiduciary, moral, and ethical obligation to 30,000 plus Manteca households to stop passing the buck.

This is simpler than it sounds.

The core problem are those still not following the rules.

All it takes is 10 percent or less or households refusing to follow simple instructions whether it is intentional or laziness.

It is why the Manteca City Council needs to go after self-centered households with the same intensity as red light runners.

The city’s trash “cop” — assuming there is still one — needs to limit warnings to one.

Then some serious fines need to start.

This is no less a willful and flagrant violation of city rules than the launching of illegal fireworks.

By the city not being more proactive on enforcement than the current tap on the hand approach, they are making everyone that follows the rules pay an even bigger price.

People get water and sewer rates.

They expect PG&E rate hike as being a given since the CPUC is 100 percent lapdog and 0 percent watchdog.

They know auto and home insurance hikes are on the way thanks to how well managed California has been.

But paying for improved landfill diversion that costs more each month in solid waste rates with recyclables not being recycled reflects a new level of government incompetence.

We created the problem.

The state mandated the solution.

The city needs to make it work by actually making everyone complies instead of keeping their fingers crossed that they will comply.

The “recyclables” are in the city truck.

It is up to Manteca to make it work.

The city needs to stop blaming Sacramento and China and do its job.

The views of Dennis Wyatt are not necessarily those of 209 Multimedia.