Boston needs to boost its recycling rate, reduce the amount of trash it disposes and improve its garbage collection services. It’s possible to do all of these while at the same time saving significant money.

In the Paper’s last issue, I wrote about the variety of strategies available to improve recycling rates. One is education, which has a positive but small effect. A second is mandatory recycling which works but is intrusive, expensive to administer and creates resentment. A third way is called unit pricing or, colloquially, “pay-per-bag.”

The basic idea of unit pricing is this. Instead of picking up all trash for free, charge, say, 50 cents a bag. If you put out three bags a week, you would be spending an additional $1.50. But there’s a twist: recyclables get picked up for free.

The adoption of such a plan produces remarkable results. The rate of recycling climbs significantly, so much so that the city saves millions annually in disposal costs (it costs less to dispose of recyclables than it does to dispose of non-recyclables). The total amount of trash disposed of drops because the per-bag fee acts as a price signal that causes people to change their behavior.

Unit pricing is not a pie-in-the-sky notion. Major cities such as Seattle and, closer to home, Worcester have adopted it. Worcester’s case is instructive. It adopted unit pricing three years ago and has seen its recycling rate climb to 55 percent, versus Boston’s mediocre rate of 12 percent. Total trash disposed of has dropped per person, and the city now saves almost a million dollars each year. Even better, the saved costs plus the per-bag fees have been used to reduce property taxes and enhance basic trash pickup, allowing for more frequent pickups and more thorough street cleaning.

If it’s such a great idea, why isn’t Boston already using it? Three objections have been voiced. One is that the per-bag fee looks like a subterfuge for a new tax. It’s a serious concern; indeed, any adoption of unit pricing should be linked specifically and simultaneously to a cut in property tax rates. The idea here is to encourage better behavior, not soak residents for more money. The net result should be to return more money to residents through reduced taxes rather than what they would actually pay in new fees.

A second objection is practicality. Some are concerned that per-bag schemes may encourage illegal dumping or result in contamination of the recyclables. Others worry about the availability of stickers and whether people will steal them off bags. These are legitimate concerns that should be addressed when devising the unit pricing plan. But they are all resolvable, as hundreds of cities and towns across the nation have found. Worcester, for example, found that contamination, an initial concern, was not a problem while illegal dumping actually dropped. (Part of this is enforcement. The fine for illegal dumping is $1,000 — a dramatic deterrent to those seeking to save 50 cents.)

The biggest issue with unit pricing, interestingly enough, is psychological. Many people treat trash pickup as an entitlement. It’s always been free; it should remain free. To an extent, the argument is just wrong: trash pickup is not free, it’s just buried in your taxes. It’s also an old argument that environmentalists have seen before, “I never used to pay to pollute, why should I pay now?” The answer in this case is that trash imposes environmental costs on all of us. Measures that can reduce it and that can boost recycling reduce those costs. They deserve serious exploration by Boston’s policy makers.