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Toronto's recycling woes
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| Magnetonium |
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. :haha:
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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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| adi_hanson |
id be glad with two repticles for recycling ,
here in the blackburn area of the UK we have a green box for tins and cans, a blue box for plastic, a bag for paper ,a brown wheelie bin for garden and food waste and finale a grey wheelie for landfill
which means puttin somethin out everyday for collection
i know its imperative to stop filling up the landfills and recycle but as humans who can split the atom there should be an easier way |
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| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by adi_hanson
id be glad with two repticles for recycling ,
here in the blackburn area of the UK we have a green box for tins and cans, a blue box for plastic, a bag for paper ,a brown wheelie bin for garden and food waste and finale a grey wheelie for landfill
which means puttin somethin out everyday for collection
i know its imperative to stop filling up the landfills and recycle but as humans who can split the atom there should be an easier way |
In my city, we have 2 blue boxes (much smaller than Toronto's) with one for fibre (papers/cardboard) and the other for containers/plastics, green cart for organics/compostables, garbage bin/bags. Residents are allowed to get more blue boxes if needed, but plastics/containers must be kept separate from papers. We have a 1 garbage bag limit in place in effect starting early next year. |
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| Arbiter |
There's no recycling available in my area. In order to recycle, I'd have to load everything into my car (small problem: I don't have a car) and then spend several hours driving around and dropping things off at various private recycling centers. There was a recycling center nearby that could take some materials a year ago, but they've since gone out of business...
I hate Texas. |
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| Fir3start3r |
| quote: | Originally posted by Magnetonium
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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1. Yes, but there are THREE SIZES. The big ones are huge (I have one of those and need it) I'll admit, and definitely geared to home owners.
Be sensible and cognisant of your own abode before ordering the monsters bins...(common sense taking a leap?)
2. Yea, you can, just get a smaller one...(see point 1.)
3. There should probably be some alternative solution for this.
4. Don't understand this logic - if you can fit one...?
5. Good!
6. Garbage bins coming soon!! Woohoo! |
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| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
1. Yes, but there are THREE SIZES. The big ones are huge (I have one of those and need it) I'll admit, and definitely geared to home owners.
Be sensible and cognisant of your own abode before ordering the monsters bins...(common sense taking a leap?)
2. Yea, you can, just get a smaller one...(see point 1.)
3. There should probably be some alternative solution for this.
4. Don't understand this logic - if you can fit one...?
5. Good!
6. Garbage bins coming soon!! Woohoo! |
Hahah, good defense! True, they come in sizes. But even the smaller ones are ... too much for some. Personally, I dont see a problem with sizes of the carts. Strong and efficient recycling systems require some pains and extra work, but thats a small price to pay for helping the environment.
Here in my town we have a difficult time rolling out green cart (compostable/organics) program to apartments. Superintendents hate it with passion - to them its more work in addition to struggling with tenants recycling as it is. They hate the odour, the raccoons, the extra work (they'd rather watch TV all day). And tenants often enough do suck balls. Like, seriously, they dont own the apartments, so they obviously dont care. Where's the catch?
Unfortunately, yes, apartments give us headaches and my front-desk ladies get bombarbed with some complaints and insults from apartments on weekly basis.
If only those people had the mentality of the rest of the folks in the city ... home owners (residential) have much more love and interest in keeping environment clean and sustainable.
Though OUR recycling (blue) boxes are much smaller than Toronto's ;-) the apartment ones we roll out come in one size and its slightly smaller than the Toronto's large size.
So it all comes down to the ethical questions like blue bins made of virgin plastic and shipped from distant lands. Thats a big no-no. There are Canadian companies willing to contribute, but even in my city, unfortunately, not all containers are made in Canada. :o |
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| Fir3start3r |
I do agree, it would be nice if the bins could be, 'Made in Canada' however if someone out there can do it cheaper then so be it - we do live in a Global economy now. ;)
And I do agree that home owners do care more - probably because they have a vested interest where a transitory apartment owner couldn't give a rat's ass (most of the time).
A system needs to be devised that will work for apartments specifically.
In the last apartment we were in, we had specific bins for glass and plastic, another for paper/cardboard and for the most part, worked well.
But this will only work as well as people who use it and there in lies the problem - the tenants.
Some are just slobs who don't give a sh$t.
If the system is made so that any goof can follow it, then IMHO, most people will follow it.
However (and I'll admit that I've been confused by this too) what can and can't be recycled and put in what bin is frustrating.
I think this list should be simplified as much as possible. Make it too confusing and people will just throw their hands up in the air and their sense of Earthly responsibility is lost to confusion and worse, apathy.
All I gotta say is, good luck Mag!
:disbelief |
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| malek |
We do have the big ones too, the good thing about it is that you don't have to bring it to the front every week because it takes longer to fill. Much better than the small bins that filled way to quickly forcing us to throw recyclables in the trash.
Also, we don't have to separate paper/metals/glass/plastics, we just throw everything there and it get sorted at the recycling plant, thats a big plus too, especially for lazy people like who don't care much about the environment :D. |
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| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by malek
Also, we don't have to separate paper/metals/glass/plastics, we just throw everything there and it get sorted at the recycling plant, thats a big plus too, especially for lazy people like who don't care much about the environment :D. |
Indeed, Quebec in places has some amazing optical sorting equipment set up at their recycling facilities. Quite mind blowing. I've read lots about it and the pictures at the meetings said it all, too. Here in Hamilton we dont have that. But we will ;-0 in October of this year our Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) is getting rewamped.
There's even talk going around in the department's Inner Circle that eventually, by 2015 there will just be a one large blue cart and all recyclables will go there (papers, containers, plastics, glass, cardboard). Optical sorting and with some manual sorting will by then be fully developed. Then one for organics (as it is) and one for garbage (tightly controlled).
Currently our recycling system, though one of the best in entire Ontario, is still very crude with mainly manual sorting system. It is yet to reach its full potential.
BTW, I'll post some pic's sometime of our facilities ;-) my professional camera got stolen last month so in time when I get another one, I'll snap some cool photos ;-)
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| Fir3start3r |
| That would be cool Mag - never seen the equipment behind the scene... |
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| jerZ07002 |
| quote: | Originally posted by malek
We do have the big ones too, the good thing about it is that you don't have to bring it to the front every week because it takes longer to fill. Much better than the small bins that filled way to quickly forcing us to throw recyclables in the trash.
Also, we don't have to separate paper/metals/glass/plastics, we just throw everything there and it get sorted at the recycling plant, thats a big plus too, especially for lazy people like who don't care much about the environment :D. |
we don't need to separate metals from plastics either - just throw it in a bag or bin market with the recycling sign and it's all good. Same goes with cardboard and papers - the two can be aggregated.
we also have a lazier option: throw the plastic in the garbage and let the homeless people fish it out (they receive 5 cents for returning a bottle to the appropriate place - where ever that it). |
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| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by adi_hanson
id be glad with two repticles for recycling ,
here in the blackburn area of the UK we have a green box for tins and cans, a blue box for plastic, a bag for paper ,a brown wheelie bin for garden and food waste and finale a grey wheelie for landfill
which means puttin somethin out everyday for collection
i know its imperative to stop filling up the landfills and recycle but as humans who can split the atom there should be an easier way |
Now here's a very interesting article for your information, for everyone's information with regards to this topic:
http://www.thespec.com/article/397761
The trash fairy is dead
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It's not easy being environmentally friendly. Just ask the Brits, who are stomping on stuffed garbage bins, stealing cans and illegally dumping to deal with new trash rules.
July 05, 2008
Sarah Lyall
New York Times News Service
WHITEHAVEN, ENGLAND (Jul 5, 2008)
The citizens of Whitehaven try, really they do. They separate out their cans, their paper, their cardboard and their glass, and they recycle them all. They compost. They jump up and down on their trash to cram it into their government-issued garbage cans, and they put the trash out for collection at exactly 7 a.m., twice a month.
But when Gareth Corkhill, a bus driver, was fined $215 -- and given a further $225 fine and a criminal record when he failed to pay -- for leaving his garbage can lid slightly ajar this spring, Whitehaven's residents banded together in dismay. They raised the money to pay the fine, and they began to complain.
"I consider the fine against Mr. Corkhill to be a matter of injustice, really, and as a Christian minister I'm required to speak out against injustice," declared Rev. John Bannister, the rector of Whitehaven, a seaside town in Cumbria. Referring to the garbage cans residents here use, he said: "To be given a criminal record for leaving your wheelie bin open by three inches has, I think, really gone beyond the bounds of responsible behaviour."
Across Europe, residents are struggling to adjust to a new era of garbage rules. Britain, particularly, is in the midst of a trash crisis, with dwindling landfill space and one of Europe's poorest recycling records. Threatened with steep fines if they dump too much trash, local governments around the country are imposing strict rules to force residents to produce less and recycle more.
Many now collect trash every other week, instead of every week. They restrict households to a limited amount of garbage and refuse to pick up more. They require garbage be put out only at strict times, reject boxes of recyclables that contain the odd nonrecyclable item and employ enforcement officers who issue warnings and impose fines for failure to comply.
Few people could dispute that in this era of dwindling environmental resources, it is essential that garbage-heavy societies like Britain change their profligate ways. "These are challenging times, and the U.K. is behind the game when it comes to relying on landfills," said Beverley Parr, a spokesperson for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Or, as Ian Curwen, a spokesperson for Copeland Borough Council, which encompasses Whitehaven, said: "Ultimately as a country, we have to do more. We can't just keep producing and throwing things away."
But Britons do not like being told what to do. Encouraged by anti-government newspapers, they particularly resent government meddling, as they see it, in such intimate matters as the contents of their garbage cans. As regulations get more stringent and enforcement more robust, there have been reports across the country of incensed residents shouting and throwing trash at garbage collectors, illegally dumping and burning excess garbage and even surreptitiously tossing trash in -- or stealing -- neighbours' garbage cans.
"It's like something out of Mad Max," Paul Nicholls, a resident of Cannock, near Birmingham, told The Guardian recently, describing the free-for-all in his town at garbage-collection time. "Every man for himself, scavenging for an extra bin."
The government says the new regulations are necessary if Britain is to adjust to the changing times. Along with the rest of Europe, Britain has been ordered to reduce the waste it puts in landfills -- by 2015, to 50 per cent of what it was in 1995 -- or face untold millions of dollars in European Union fines.
That means people have to completely rethink their relationship to their refuse, said Paul Bettison, chairman of the environment board of the Local Government Association.
"It's a sad thing to have to shatter people's illusions, but gone are the days when we could put all our rubbish and junk in a big bag and overnight the fairy would come and take it away, and that would be the end of it," Bettison said. "The rubbish fairy is dead."
The twice-a-month collection regimen, now in use in more than half the country, is particularly unpopular and became a contentious issue in recent local elections, in which the ruling Labour Party was trounced by its opponents.
Among other things, said Doretta Cocks, who runs the 22,000-member Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, having infrequent collections creates a health hazard, what with the smell, the maggots and the rats.
"It's supposed to be environmentally friendly, but it's not," Cocks said. "How can it be environmentally friendly to have two weeks' worth of rubbish in your house?"
Whitehaven provides many of its homeowners with an array of recycling bins as well as government-regulation wheelie bins that are often modest in size, to say the least, holding perhaps four large garbage bags.
"My bin's always full," said a 62-year-old Whitehaven resident, who says he can force five bags in there if he jumps on them vigorously enough. He is engaged in a running battle with the garbage collectors. Once he put an extra bag of trash on top of his bin; they refused to pick it up and left the garbage from the now-ripped bag sprawled on the street. Once, when he failed to close his lid properly, he received a "nasty note saying it was overloaded," he said.
The note was followed by a sticker of shame affixed to the bin announcing that he was violating local garbage laws. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is afraid of running afoul of the authorities, says he now regularly takes his extra trash out to an empty field and burns it.
Parr, the environmental department spokesperson, said that Britain recycled just 7 per cent of its waste in 1997, compared with 33 per cent now. (More than 60 per cent of its waste ends up in landfills, compared with 55 per cent for the United States in 2006.) Britain is poised to experiment with programs under which households would pay according to how much garbage they throw out, just as they pay for the quantity of water or electricity used.
Under one scenario, people's bins would be fitted with microchips, enabling local councils to record the weight or volume of garbage per household. Such bins are used already in other European countries.
In Whitehaven, the residents are annoyed enough about the rules they already have.
Claire Corkhill, whose husband received the fine for their open bin, is still recovering from the indignity of having two uniformed garbage enforcement officers, or "garbage police," as they are known locally, show up at her house.
"They were wearing stab vests," she said, referring to a type of body armour. "My sister is a police officer, so we thought it was a joke."
Curwen, the council spokesperson, said the Corkhills had failed to respond to several warnings. "They got a sticker, and then a letter, and then another letter saying, 'Would you like us to come round and discuss your waste situation with you, because we need to reduce our land filling and the fines are quite steep,'" he said.
Curwen said people in similar situations -- unable to close their bins because of too much garbage -- should telephone the council. "We can give you tips on recycling and reducing waste," he said.
Bettison of the Local Government Association said there would always be some people who needed extra prodding.
"To encourage people to do something, you start off by asking them 'Please,'" he said. "Then you say 'Pretty please.' But if they don't respond to carrots, you have to move a little more along the scale that has carrots on one end and sticks on the other. You have to make it a little more difficult for them not to recycle."
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