City Hall: Poop and scoop and take it home

Cross-posted from Eye Daily.

The problem of dogs in parks just got bigger. A recent trash audit done in Toronto parks (which I wrote about in a recent post) found that 23-27 percent of the waste in trash bins is dog poop. When you consider that there are 1,500 parks across the entire city, that’s a lot of plastic bags full of shit.

Since “animal waste” is banned from the Michigan landfill and since that’s where the trash collected from park garbage bins go, city staff say they’ve got to educate dog owners to carry their poop home to either deposit in their green bins or flush (sans plastic) down the toilet.

“I don’t think that the notion that you’re just going to carry it home is an urban notion,” argued Pam McConnell at this morning’s Parks and Environment Committee meeting. She also pointed out that not everyone has access to green bins yet.

So why not put green bins in parks?

The problem with that, say staff, is capacity. The green bin program has been so successful that we’re already over capacity, in fact, there’s no capacity anywhere in Ontario to deal with more organic waste, they say.

But what about all the apartment and condo dwellers that will soon get green bins? What about the agencies, boards and commissions who want to start green binning their trash as well? Saying we’re over capacity and that the only solution is to get dog owners to cart their poop home doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution.

Another challenge that dog poop presents is that most people put it in plastic bags. “There’s more plastic than product,” said city staff, which brought up another interesting point about Toronto’s green bin program. While other cities require residents to use biodegradable bags to collect organic waste, in Toronto, plastic is okay (although, for some reason, it wouldn’t be if the organic waste were collected in city parks.) Now that many Torontonians have gotten used to the green bin system, perhaps it’s time to step it up a notch and require the use of biodegradable bags. Either way, if the city’s parks department intends to reach its goal of diverting 60 percent of its waste by the end of 2007 (right now waste diversion sits at 43 percent), dog owners are going to have to be more consciencious about their poop.

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Visit Eye Weekly’s City Hall Blog to read regular updates and reports on municipal politics from Spacing’s Managing Editor Dale Duncan and Eye Weekly’s City Editor Edward Keenan.
Photo by Rene Johnston/Toronto Star.