Toronto's recycling woes
Yeah, yeah, I know, its little-and-not-important Canada and who cares, right? But after all, Canada started the whole recycling craze, THATS RIGHT! We brought it onto the rest of the world, to follow our example ... and now, things are starting to get out of control a bit ...
I love environment and part of my (real) job is to follow and develop my city's (NOT Toronto) recycling, composting and garbage programs to make it better for the environment and for the taxpayers. I work in the planning department. I get to talk and teach many residents about our programs. Too bad its only a 1-year co-op placement through college (for my diploma).
Anyways, Toronto is doing its own thing, kinda ridiculous at times, and I find it funny how they're getting ripped apart by the media. I felt like you guys should see what the amusement is all about.
Read about it, and please post on the thread about recycling, composting and garbage programs in your hometown/area. As well as voice your opinions, and maybe describe how your program is working (some specs?)
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Colu...6016571-sun.php
Raising a stink over big blue bins
T.O.'s new plastic behemoths are trucked in from U.S.
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Ah, the long Canada Day weekend, a time to indulge in such national past times as cracking open a cold beer, firing up the barbecue, and of course, recycling.
What's that you say? You didn't know recycling is one of our great Canadian traditions? Well, pull up a deck chair and we'll tell you a story about how it all began on our very doorstep.
You see the blue box was pioneered right here in the land of the maple leaf -- in Kitchener to be exact -- by a local garbage collector in the early '80s who knew we Canucks were willing to do more to save the planet. It began as a cardboard box and soon evolved into the ubiquitous blue plastic container that has decorated curbsides everywhere.
They were as Canadian as the flow of maple syrup and the Leafs losing.
But now, dear recyclers, those boxes are being replaced by ugly, steroid-laden blue bins on wheels that can be automatically loaded by trucks so that our garbage collectors need never lift a thing. Still, as you do your Canadian duty this holiday by tossing your beer cans into your very own monster bin, you'd at least expect that it's been manufactured in your home and native land.
But oh Canada, you'd be wrong.
Instead, it turns out this new blue blight on our cityscape comes to us from the American Rehrig Pacific Company headquartered in Los Angeles with locations in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. The blue box system may have started with a pilot project in Kitchener more than 25 years ago and emulated everywhere, but in their infinite wisdom, Toronto City Hall looked south when they decided to replace our boxes with giant wheeled carts in their aggressive -- some would argue delusional -- plan to achieve 70% waste diversion from landfill by 2010.
"This was a $70 million deal," complains St. Paul's Councillor Michael Walker. "There's got to be a place to find them in Canada."
In fact, of the four bidders on the contract to supply new recycling and garbage bins, one included Norseman Plastics, an Etobicoke company in a joint venture with Michigan-based Cascade Engineering. But according to the general manager of Toronto waste reduction, buying Canadian wasn't even one of the criteria in the decision process. "It came down to looking for the best value for the city," explains Geoff Rathbone.
Forget for a moment how desperately this city could have used the manufacturing jobs, these new recycling bins aren't only unpatriotic -- they're also oxymoronic.
These blue monsters are supposed to be all about going green. But it turns out that's a pile of rubbish. After all, there's nothing environmentally sensitive about the carbon footprint of producing and trucking more than one million of these behemoths up from the United States.
And the idea behind these trash recyclers gets even smellier. Not only are they American, too big for tight urban living and too unwieldy for little old ladies, the new blue bins are also made from -- wait for it -- virgin plastic.
Yes, in our efforts to be more environmentally friendly, our new recycling bins are actually made from unrecycled plastic. Doesn't that seem to defeat the purpose?
"I'm actually surprised since David Miller and his group are so insistent on green things -- I don't know what happened here," says a surprised Councillor Doug Holyday of Etobicoke Centre. "I would have at least wanted to know what the cost difference would have been to use recycled plastic and if it was close, I certainly would have supported it."
Don Valley East Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong agrees "there's nothing environmental in the amount of (new) plastic we used to make these bins."
The better option, he says, would have been to use the existing boxes and increase collection from once every two weeks to a weekly schedule. "You wouldn't have to use these massive bins that you can't get into your garage and that make our neighbourhoods look crappy."
Especially, he says, because this new costly, environmentally-insensitive plan doesn't even accomplish very much. "We're probably spending $50 million or more and inconveniencing thousands of residents and we're getting a lousy three extra percentage points in waste diversion."
Walker is also shocked that we've bought one million carts -- including the upcoming fee-based grey garbage bins -- made of unrecycled plastic. "It's one of the worst environmental moves you can make," he argues. "The blue boxes we had worked. Why spend all this money to create a new system when the old system was working?"
Instead, he says, it's just another waste of taxpayers dollars. "I'm paying enough in municipal taxes. What am I getting for it?"
Shelter for the homeless it seems -- as in lots of new blue American condos for our friendly raccoons. 
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Oh, this one is even more entertaining:
The monster (blue bin) that ate downtown
New recycling carts work like a dream in the suburbs, but they're a nightmare in the core
KELLY GRANT
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
May 2, 2008 at 11:59 PM EDT
^^^ Image captions:
1. They're BIG! (Toronto's mayor photo)
2. You can't drag them up the stairs.
3. They are hard on the physically disabled.
4. You can fit one down the alley.
5. Oh, look! There's another one coming! (meaning one blue box for papers/cardboard, other for plastics and containers).
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Take Larry Blake's mammoth new recycling bin – please.
As a resident of one of the steepest streets in the Beaches, Mr. Blake, 46, can't drag the wheeled cart up the 32 concrete steps in front of his house. He has abandoned the bin, unused, at the foot of his stairs until the city stops picking up the recycling he puts out in clear plastic bags.
“It's a raving eyesore,” he says. “We're thinking of putting a ‘take me' sign on it.”
As acts of civil disobedience go, Mr. Blake's is minor. But by rejecting the 240-litre recycling bin, a contraption large enough to hold a grown man, Mr. Blake has joined the increasingly noisy revolt against phase one of Mayor David Miller's new trash regime.
Evidence of the rebellion is sprouting in dense, east-side neighbourhoods like Cabbagetown, Corktown and Riverdale, where city crews have already delivered the new recycling tubs to homes, many of which don't have laneways, garages or backyards in which to stash them. Residents have been forced to plunk the carts out front like giant plastic weeds on their tidy lawns.
“[In] a historic neighbourhood,” says Lee Garrison, president of the Don Vale Cabbagetown Residents Association, “it's totally unacceptable.”
More than 100,000 Torontonians – a whopping one-third of the residents who've received bins so far – have called the city's bin hotline with questions and gripes since the solid-waste department began dropping off bins late last November. About 500 have complained forcefully enough to get a home visit from a member of the city's “bin team.”
Angry Cabbagetown denizens nearly derailed a public meeting when they got a look at the size of the bins. Councillor Paula Fletcher, whose ward includes south Riverdale and Leslieville, has received more than 180 complaints, including a blank e-mail with a photo of a constituent head-first in a large bin, his legs poking out the top.
“The only other volume and level of [negative] response that I've ever had like this is around social-housing projects,” Ms. Fletcher says.
The bin troubles are poised to migrate west. In the next few weeks, the city will ramp up delivery on the other side of Yonge. (The rollout is complete to all but 2,000 homes east of Yonge and has already begun on the west side of North York.) That means residents of other dense neighbourhoods, like the Annex, Parkdale and Queen West, are girding themselves for the hysteria that has already hit the inner-city's east side.
There is some irony in all this. The recycling-cart delivery was supposed to be the palatable phase of Toronto's new pay-by-what-you-throw garbage system, which officially launches in the city's more than 5,000 apartment and condo buildings July 1, and in its 500,000 single-family homes Nov. 1.
Torontonians, after all, treat garbage-reduction like a religion which decrees that it is sinful to toss a pop can in the trash and blasphemous to complain about separating your newspapers from your empty water bottles.
When the city introduced its green-bin program in 2002, residents embraced weeding banana peels and soiled diapers out of the trash with the zeal of the born-again. Trash bureaucrats initially predicted they would collect 175 kilograms of green-bin waste per household per year; today they collect about 220 kilograms.
“The 1 per cent who aren't happy [with the new recycling carts] all start off their complaint with, ‘I love recycling …' ” says Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, chair of the city's public works committee and an enthusiastic supporter of the new regime.
There are, of course, people who like the new blue bins as much as they like recycling, especially in former suburbs like Scarborough, where storage is convenient. The bins fit more material than blue boxes. They have lids to keep papers from blowing down the street on recycling day and wheels that make it easy to roll the bins on flat, clear pavement.
And, as Mr. Miller is quick to point out, of the approximately 300,000 homes that have received the carts so far, only 300 have found the bins so unworkable that the city granted them the option of using plastic bags, the most flexible of the city's back-up options for unhappy recyclers.
“This is massive change, a significant, positive change to Toronto,” Mr. Miller says. “To roll out a program to 500,000 households, with three-fifths of that done so far, with a relatively small number of complaints, I think is a significant accomplishment.”
Fade to grey
It remains to be seen how the city will greet the program's second phase, the delivery of the grey garbage bins whose size determines how much homeowners pay annually to have trash hauled away.
When those bins begin to land later this year, Trinity-Spadina Councillor Adam Vaughan sees a more complex set of problems ahead for constituents who live above shops on thoroughfares like Spadina Avenue. He signed on to a pilot project there allowing apartment dwellers to test different options, including bags.
But for Mr. Vaughan, the verdict on the new garbage program is already in. “The pilot project is trying to make this system, which doesn't work, work,” he says, frustrated at what he sees as a suburban solution being imposed on a downtown urban environment.
Between the new garbage bill and the new program's restrictive rules – homeowners can only exceed their bin limit by four free bags per year, for example, something critics say will prompt illegal dumping – Mr. De Baeremaeker is bracing for complaints.
“People won't like it,” he admits. “But it's like some horrible-tasting cough syrup. You may not like it, but it's good for you.”
The new regime is “good for you” in that it's designed to whip into shape the garbage scofflaws who don't recycle religiously, with financial incentives serving as the cat-o'-nine tails.
The goal of the program is to divert 70 per cent of Toronto's garbage from the dump by 2010, a target that Geoff Rathbone, the general manager of the city's solid-waste department, admits will be tough to meet. (In 2007, Toronto diverted 42 per cent of its waste, unchanged from 2006.)
The system's financial incentives are straightforward: People who throw more in the trash pay more to have it hauled from the curb.
Today, garbage pick-up is paid for out of the property-tax base, which means the more you pay in property taxes, the larger the share you pay of Toronto's $183.5-million solid-waste budget.
The city had a second motive for choosing the volume-based approach. It needed the extra cash. The plan requires an additional $54-million per year to aggressively expand diversion programs, including bringing the green bin to apartments.
Mr. Rathbone knows some residents will find the volume-based system confusing and restrictive. He wants them to consider the “big picture.”
“They have to recognize that the city will likely never have another landfill within our jurisdiction,” he says.
That reality drives the new plan. Right now, Toronto sends an average of 74 trucks of trash daily to a Michigan dump. In 2011, the city will start dumping garbage at Green Lane, the southwestern Ontario landfill Toronto purchased for $220-million last year. If Toronto's diversion rate stays at 42 per cent, Green Lane will be full by 2024. If the city hits its 70-per-cent target, the dump will last an additional decade.
Mr. Rathbone and Mr. De Baeremaeker say the new system is more even-handed than the old one. It charges residents by how much garbage they throw out, not by the assessed value of their homes.
“It's very fair,” Mr. De Baeremaeker says. “Even for somebody who's in a large family, I'm very comfortable saying to that large family, ‘Well, you pay more for water because your family drinks more water. That's fair. You pay more for bananas because your family eats more bananas. That's fair.' ”
Fair or not, the new bins still annoy some residents in pockets like Cabbagetown. There, local councillor Pam McConnell and solid-waste staff have worked to find house-to-house solutions, such as allowing neighbours to share a bin, or, if alternatives are impossible, letting homeowners stick with clear plastic bags.
“I think that we've come up with some reasonable solutions to allow this to move forward because the important part is to be on board for diverting 70 per cent as quickly as possible,” Ms. McConnell says.
Still, not everyone is satisfied. In Riverdale, there's Sister Catherine Yaskiw, 50. She has had to find someone else to pull the new colossal carts to the curb from behind Holy Eucharist Ukrainian Catholic Church on Broadview Avenue. They're too heavy for her to handle, even on clear pavement. “How are you supposed to pull it in the winter?” she asks. “Are they going to put skis on the wheels for me?”
In Corktown, Chris Hutcheson has resigned himself to parking his new recycling cart on his porch. The 55-year-old management trainer is not happy about it – “it's ugly,” he says – but with only an inch of air separating his Trinity Avenue row house from its unattached neighbour, he would have to drag the bin across the hardwood floors of his 14-foot-wide home to store the bin in his backyard.
In Cabbagetown, Randy Brown, the 64-year-old founder of the Cabbagetown Arts and Crafts Festival, lives in a row house. He helped broker the deal that allowed Cabbagetown residents with no laneways or garages – himself included – to use plastic bags.
Last week, the city accidentally deposited a monster blue bin on his lawn anyway.
“I think the whole thing is absolutely shameful,” Mr. Brown says. With files from Jennifer Lewington
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Whenever you go and buy something, you are affecting someone somewhere, be it environment, a person, or a community - you're making a statement with what you buy. So make it a smart choice ... Its a big picture
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