Cross-posted from Eye Daily.
It’s a given that the city needs to change the rules related to garbage collection. Right now, there’s a six-bag limit per household per pick up day (six bags!), and that doesn’t include recycling. With the new green bin and our now ubiquitous blue box, what kind of household needs to fill six-bags every two weeks?
If this couple can make almost zero garbage in one month, surely the rest of us can cut back on the amount of trash we take to the curb every week. To help ensure this happens, the city is toying with the idea of charging homeowners an annual fee for the garbage bins they use. The smaller the bin you buy, the less you’ll have to pay. The cost of the bins would replace the current fee we pay for waste disposal out of our property taxes. You’ve probably already read the coverage of the proposed scheme in one of the dailies. Reading Toronto has some good things to say about it here.
The whole thing sounds like a great idea, until someone brings up the fact that under this plan lower income residents end up paying more for garbage disposal than they did in the past. “Charge everyone $180 to pick up a standard bin and the poor person pays more of his or her wages than the well-off person,†writes Royson James in Today’s Toronto Star.
Perhaps the bigger problem is that if we’re going to ask people to produce less waste, we need to make it easier for them to do so. It’s sort of like Mayor Miller’s argument against putting road tolls on the DVP and Gardiner Expressway — he says he won’t consider charging drivers for using these freeways until viable public transit options are put in place. If we’re going to charge people for the amount of waste they create, how about also telling businesses that they have to cut back on packaging? How about charging fast food restaurants for all the garbage they export to the city’s street-side garbage bins and public parks? All this talk of reducing Toronto’s trash seems disproportionately focused on residents. The role that restaurants and other businesses play in the amount of garbage we produce is suspiciously absent from the debate.
And then there are the times when our biggest trash makers are actually commended. According to another article in the Toronto Star published yesterday, a city audit of garbage cans in parks found an abundance of waste from fast food outlets. Of the 572 cans examined, 303 of them contained trash from Tim Hortons. The Canadian coffee shop topped the chart in fast food waste.
I almost spit out my coffee when I read what Paul Ronan, director of parks for the city, was quoted as saying next: “Actually, Tim Hortons has done a great job working with us,†he said. “They do a lot with our annual clean-up days.â€
Tim Hortons has done a great job? This is same company that encourages people to buy more disposable cups with its roll up the rim to win contests and has zero recycling in any of the Toronto stores I’ve been to (and zero information on whether or not you can recycle their cups even though, supposedly, they now have specially designed blue bins in locations across Ontario.) Instead of being commended, they should be slapped with a fine for failing to provide recycling in their stores. Better yet, why not have fast food chains pay for street-side garbage bins sans advertising, the kind that the city says it can’t afford?
Got something to say about how Toronto deals with its trash? The city is looking for public feedback on how it handles its garbage. For more information, check out the city’s website (scroll down to the third item under “what’s new.â€) The deadline for filling out an official comment form is April 20.
Click here to post a comment.
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 Kevin Steele
