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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.”
Larry Blake outside his home in the Beaches area of Toronto, April 30/2008. The city is moving forward with a plan to use these large bins but people with alot of stairs can't lug these new recyclable bins up their stairs. (Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)
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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.
