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• Urban dream deferred [ Toronto Star ]
• Neighbourhoods in need [ Toronto Star ]
• Gimme shelter — and some lights, too [ Toronto Star ]
• Time to step up and pay our true garbage tab [ Toronto Star ]
• Pedestrians expanding their toehold [ Toronto Star ]
• Natives push for inclusion in proposed museum [ Globe and Mail ]
• Hot time in Old Town forever [ Toronto Star ]
• Power outage near Union Station affect GO transit service [ cbc ]
• Despite setback, Councillor pushing for panhandling ban [ Globe and Mail ]
• TTC and firefighters will get together at Keele subway station yard for a day of training [ National Post ]
• Blades found in Oakville playarea [ Toronto Sun ]
• Police close playground in Oakville after razor blades found nearby in wood chips [ National Post ]
• Downtown parking lot to become shared garden [ National Post ]

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5 comments

  1. I wonder if the Mayor (and Chris Hume) realises that by separating garbage from property tax they are opening the door to private collection companies, so that the city would continue to pick up recycling and green free but a householder might choose to buy the smallest city bin possible (or none if that is an option) and get a contract from a private collector for the remainder if offered more cheaply.

    What would the unionised collectors, who engineered the contracting in of city garbage collecting recently at a cost of millions in termination fees, say then? What would the GHG impact and noise impact be to the city of multiple garbage trucks trundling down streets rather than 1 per week as currently?

    Worst case of course is increased dumping of private refuse in city bins, in parkland and in derelict sites.

  2. The water charge of less than 4 dollars per million litres planned by Dalton is one of the strangest things I have ever heard. How about 1000 dollars per? or more? Its about time bottlers had to pay but it has to have teeth.

    Of course, bottled water is possibly the greatest marketing scam in history and must be a huge creator or plastic waste juding by the bags of empty bottles I see on garbage day.

  3. Toronto’s garbage policy is abouut saving money and not about reducing waste.

    Bringing in apartment dwellers into the reuction fold would be the largest and most important next step that would be within the Citys power.

    Remember that all the stuff that the City no longer collects (often ending up in parks) STILL goes into the ground, you just pay a private company to do it. And as Mark is says private collection may be cheaper for the City but not green.

  4. The easiest way to get apartment dwellers to become green is to use the garbage chute for green waste only, meaning that the dumping of garbage would have to require traveling outside of your building and throwing it into an external dumpster, the way you have to do with recylcables today.

    This would be popular because green household waste is the only garbage that really smells. By letting this go down the convenient chute in your hallway, rather than the non-compostable trash, you encourage more people to use the green bin system while discouraging waste creation.

  5. In 2004 I was sitting in Olivia Chow’s office as she grilled City staff along with Glen De Baeremaeker on how long it would take for them to get a green bin pilot project up and running in multi-residential buildings in their wards.

    The Staff answer was (to paraphrase): “We’d like to but we have no where to put the green bin materials.”

    So what this issue comes down to is how to get the funds to build the infrastructure required to accomodate the volume of organic waste Toronto has. At a later point, to get all multi-residential dwellings on board, there may be practical issues like the one Leonard is trying to solve.

    And needless to say, Toronto doesn’t have the capital to build an organic waste processing plant. So it means that at some point the province will have to ante up, property taxes/user fees will skyrocket (a la water bills for pipe repairs) and/or the City will enter into an almost certainly disasterous P3 (or as the more skeptical among us say, a P6: Public Partner Pays, Private Partner Profits).