You may have heard this week that in addition to raising your taxes beyond the level of inflation the City of Toronto is considering charging you to take away your trash. Welcome to the megacity.

If the two seem connected then you're probably like most home owners. Let's think a bit: the cost of water is going up, taxes are going up, and garbage fees might begin. Ouch. That is a lot of extra financial burden on an already highly taxed population. Doesn't the city argue that other levels of government are already taxing us for many of the services the city must now re-tax us for to cover the shortfalls when those governments don't transfer the money back to our community?

All of this taxing and re-taxing gets complicated. That's why the city's announcement that it may (you just know that it will) begin to charge for garbage removal makes for really bad timing. Why? It is simple. If we really do want the cleaner environment that pollsters say we do then paying for garbage removal will help. It is just too bad the idea seems more like another cash grab by confused governments than a smart way to reduce our environmental impact.

For those readers who are complaining that this new fee is too much then I'd recommend you get Elizabeth Royte's book, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail Of Trash. Royte is a skilled writer and her voyage of garbage self-discovery (she asks "where does my garbage go?") makes for a surprisingly engrossing read.

I'll reveal Royte's punchline for those of you who are working 16 hours a day to pay off your increased taxes. All garbage is bad garbage. There is no effective way to rid the environment of our trash. The only real answer is to not make it in the first place.

Do you think trucking our garbage 200 kilometers south and burying it is a good idea? Well, sorry, it isn't for a plethora of reasons from the increased carbon emissions those garbage trucks produce to the inevitable poisoning of the local water table by garbage leachates (when you're dealing with millions of tonnes of trash all barriers designed to retain toxins fail in time).

Do you think incineration is the answer? Well, wrong again. Even if all those nasty carcinogens our garbage produces are magically vapourized what happens to all the other gases and all that heat energy? Global warming anyone?

But wait, how about using our organic waste as fertilizer? Turns out that this is no panacea either. It is not recommended to use biosolids (a nice clean word for our crap) as a fertilizer for edible produce.

No, the answer is don't produce as much garbage as we do now. Charging for the disposal of trash will make people aware of just how much waste they produce. That, in turn, will work its way up the consumption food chain to suppliers who will have to pay for the trash they produce while making the stuff that becomes our trash.

The timing of Toronto's pay-as-you-dump announcement is just plain bad, but let's not discount it as a money-grab just yet. This is one time when government's hand in your pocket might just be good for you.

1. What a timely post! I am currently reading Royte’s book for an article Peter and I are writing for a book coming out later this year, and agree that it is a fascinating and telling subject. I agree wholly that a main solution is to produce less waste in the first place.

   The problem is that no single-track solution will accomplish this. And the City of Toronto’s fee-per bin garbage plan, while probably workable, will amount to no more than a tax grab unless it is accompanied by some other, positive measures.

   For instance:

   • Will municipal councilors be required to pay for each bag of garbage produced by their own office at City Hall? This would only seem fair.
   • Will consumers have the opportunity to discard excess packaging at supermarkets, and will supermarkets in turn be able to return those materials to their suppliers by right? Otherwise, the ‘trickle up’ effect will falter at the local level.
   • Will the city vastly expand the hours and locations of its re-use centres, so that residents will have more opportunities to drop off useful things they don’t want rather than drop them in the trash?
   • Will the City repeal by-law sections prohibiting scavenging? Currently, residents are encouraged to report anybody they see digging through garbage on the street. Since this includes me (and Peter) on a regular basis, and since any scavenging we do reduces the amount of garbage going to landfill, I wonder why our activities must be criminalized.
   • Will this new program be implemented in the city’s many apartment buildings? It seems to me that the City is seeking to achieve its waste reduction targets without tackling the hard problems—including figuring out how to reduce apartment-generated waste.

     We sort our garbage carefully, compost, re-use, salvage, and recycle. I have noticed that the bulk of our trash now consists of plastic packaging and bags. Some of this seems unavoidable for food and product safety, but much of it is advertising-related. Rather than placing the entire burden on residents and consumers, I’d also like to see some responsibility to reduce waste placed on manufacturers and sellers.

     I’d love to hear others’ views on this subject.

     Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  04/06  at  10:02 AM

   • We all have to pay our way when it comes to trash. Companies have to do their share. Apple Computer recently agreed to take back all the packaging it generates. If they can do it so can IBM, Proctor and Gamble, and so on.

     Posted by Steph Miller  on  04/06  at  10:32 AM

   • Pay-per-bin sounds like a good idea from a trash-reduction standpoint. Here’s how it works in practice:
     —your lazy, cheap neighbor gets the smallest bin possible
     —each week, he waits until you put your large bin out and then stuffs his trash in your bin
     —bad feelings all around

     It leads to a terrible, nasty game where freeloaders abound and diligent citizens are punished. Household trash production varies quite a lot from week to week – compare the week before December 25 and the week after. Either you sit on trash for multiple weeks to even out your weekly “throw”, or you have to pay for a bin large enough to handle a large trash week at your house… and meanwhile your neighbor is stuffing his trash in it every week… nobody wins.

     Posted by  on  04/07  at  12:51 PM

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