On March 17, 2024, the Mouse Trap News blog reported that Walt Disney World had announced park guests would need to pay $2 in order to toss out garbage in trash cans. According to the story, trash cans would be fitted with MagicBand readers allowing them to easily and quickly pay to use the bins:
New Pay to Throw Away Trash Program at Disney World
You now need to pay to use trashcans at Disney World. It will cost you $2 to use a Disney trashcan to throw out your trash. To enforce this, Disney has installed MagicBand readers on all of their garbage cans.
If you want to throw out any trash, you scan your MagicBand. Then, the garbage can will unlock, so you can throw away your trash. It will only be unlocked for 30 seconds. If you don't get everything in during that time, you will need to pay again.
The $2 will be charged to your My Disney Experience account. This is an effort by Disney to be more environmentally conscious. By forcing guests to pay to use trashcans, it encourages them to think about their consumption.
Mouse Trap News also published the purported news to its TikTok account with the caption, "You can either pay $2 to throw trash out or carry it all day!"
TikTok comments showing some users appeared to partially believe the news read as follows: "Can't be true," "This is nuts," "This can't be true," "lol that's gonna backfire," "Is this real?" and "that's not a good idea." Similarly, on X, one user posted, "Just heard that you have to pay $2 to use trash cans at Disney World. You've got to be kidding me."
The truth of the matter was that Disney didn't announce anything about charging park guests to use trash cans. A disclaimer on the Mouse Trap News website says its stories are satirical and are nothing but a bit of good fun:
Mouse Trap News is the world's best satire site. We write fake stories about Disney Parks stuff. From Disney Park announcements to Disney Hotel and resort news to made-up Disney partnerships, you can be assured that anything you read here is not true, real, or accurate, but it is fun.
For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.