Forget to be or not to be: The question is, does tinfoil go in the recycling bin? No, seriously, does it? And what about those clear plastic boxes of fancy lettuce?
Burning questions! Everyone in Toronto is watching their waste these days, now that it costs to have your trashes hauled - $39 a year for collection of a medium-sized grey garbage bin every two weeks, with only five grace bags a year for blowouts such as Christmas. But the rules are so arcane, it's enough to drive a citizen to drink (wine bottles, blue bin; screw tops, grey bin).
As of Dec. 8, as city council debates strict penalties to limit "single-use in-store packaging," Torontonians can add plastic bags to their blue boxes, along with foam polystyrene packaging and take-out food containers - the white "clamshell" that your rapidly cooling burrito rides home in.
The new measures could spare a year's worth of local landfill. That's a rare commodity for a city that currently sends nearly 80 trash trucks a day to Michigan, enough solid waste to almost fill the Rogers Centre over the course of a year. Except that, as with all things environmental, it's nowhere near that simple.
Yes, burrito-bearing clam-shell take-out containers are recyclable, as long as they are bendy polystyrene foam. The clamshell you can buy raspberries in - the one with a clear top and a black polystyrene bottom - is not.
Yes, the hot-drink cup you get at Tim Hortons is made of recyclable paper.
But you can't recycle the cup in your blue box. That's partly because the cup always comes with a non-recyclable polystyrene lid.
With an estimated 365 million take-out cups sold every year in Toronto and then offloaded into the public-waste-management system, the city no longer wants to take on Timmys take-out trash (or that of any other retailer).
And yes, as of Dec. 8 you can recycle the plastic bags the supermarket gives you to carry away your groceries.
What you can't toss in your blue box in Toronto, given the counter-intuitive logic of the waste-management world, is a biodegradable bag. Biodegradable bags will contaminate the quality of the non-biodegradable plastic bags the city plans to sell to recyclers, and they take up space in landfill, which recycled bags do not. (As Glenn De Baeremaeker, the city councillor and enviro-zealot who chairs the city works committee said a few days ago, "It turns out plastic is a valuable resource." Biodegradable bags turn into dirt. "Is that what we want to do with a precious natural resource. Turn it into dirt?") You can, however, toss a biodegradable bag into the green box even though it will be mechanically extracted and tossed in the trash by the city. Are we confused yet?
The intricacies of what can and can't be recycled has created at least five recycling character types.
The Scofflaw
Mr. T. (a pseudoinitial: garbage is so politically hot these days, hardly anyone will tell the truth on the record), Rosedale. Mr. T's wife, a perfectionist, cannot bear household odours of any kind. She can smell a fuzzy mushroom at 40 paces. As a result, composting is out: She simply heaves their gloop into a vacuum-fanned kitchen-trash compactor with the rest of the non-recyclable debris. (Repeated dumping of compacted trash into one's grey bin is a fineable offence, if Toronto's garbage cops catch her. Yes, the city has garbage cops, and yes, there's a snitch line.)
"Basically we're ignoring composting," Mr. T says. "It's sort of like some dark sexual secret in our house. We just press it in with the rest and pretend it never happened."
The Anarchist
Mr. D., Moore Park. "I've gone rogue," says Mr. D., an avid environmentalist and Green Party supporter. "I know, for example, that certain kinds of plastic shouldn't go in the recycling bin." (That would be your so-called rigid or crystalline polystyrene, the clear, virtually impenetrable plastic used to package digital camera chips.) "But I think they should be recyclable, so I put 'em in anyway."
The Nonconformist (a.k.a. the Lazy Shit)
Mr. S., the Annex. If you say, "Does the white meat tray go in the recycling?" Mr. S. says, "It depends on my mood."
