I got talking to a friend in my small town the other day. She and her husband are about to refurbish an older downtown building for their business. She said she’d become a little frustrated, partly with the delays getting the project going. But she was also miffed at something she hadn’t expected. In anticipation of the refuse from the coming reno, she had hired a firm to drop off one of those large, industrial disposal containers. Not long after the bin arrived at the construction site, the contractor asked if she had dumped some garbage not associated with the planned business reno into the bin. She said no, she hadn’t.
“Well then what’s a sofa doing in the disposal bin?” he asked.
She was really perplexed. You mean, a stranger had simply dumped an unwanted piece of furniture – not a lamp or a card table, mind you, a sofa – into her large garbage container right on a main street? How bizarre is that?
I mean, most often, things work the other way, don’t they? I place a piece of old furniture, a busted lawn mower, a used bicycle or some potential firewood at the curb. I put a “free” sign next to it and almost immediately the stuff gets picked up and taken away by somebody who can make use of it. But here was a case of freeloading in reverse. Suddenly someone, who felt the world was his oyster, also considered somebody else’s garbage bin was his for the picking too. Heck, this wasn’t even freeloading. It was something completely new: Garbage entitlement.
What’s going on out there? Granted garbage has become a sensitive subject lately (consider my “Garbage Police” column of May 2008). I’ve noticed, for example, that a lot of folks in Toronto have rebelled against the city’s new mega Blue Bin recycle boxes. My sister lives along Danforth Avenue and she points out that many of her elderly or disabled neighbours have a lot of trouble piling all their recyclables – paper, cans, glass and plastic – into this mother-of-all Blue Bins and muscling it to the curb.
I’ve also heard that some jurisdictions have already instituted pay-as-you-pitch fees; in other words, if you go beyond a certain number of garbage bags at the curb each pick-up day, you pay for each extra bag. So garbage has started hitting people in the pocketbook, a pretty sensitive spot. But dumping a sofa into an industrial garbage bin in broad daylight?
Pretty soon, we’re not only going to have security guards patrolling property and fence lines to keep valuables in. But we can probably look forward one day to a new brand of cop keeping other people’s former valuables out. A few months ago – back in that May column – I strongly criticized those who regularly spit gum on the sidewalk, chuck bottles by the side of the road or flick cigarette butts out car windows. During a break at Canada Day festivities, last week, I sat with journalism colleague Roger Varley. He was finishing a cigarette. He butted it out and (given my rant about cigarette flipping) he searched in vain for a place to toss the butt. I laughed. The guilt factor is finally working.
Not long after I began writing this column, about 20 years ago, I recall an incident involving disappearing copies of the paper. There was also the issue of waste involved. It turned out that one or a number of newspaper carriers were dumping bundles of undelivered copies of the newspaper in the park. The carriers claimed the newspapers had been delivered to the neighbourhood in question. Of course, they hadn’t. They had merely been delivered to the backside of a grove of trees to rot. And no doubt the carrier still collected the full fee for delivering those papers. I guess that was a case of commercial garbage entitlement.
Incidentally, I mentioned Toronto’s new larger Blue Bin campaign. Maybe it’s something we should consider. Despite expected complaints about wrestling the mega bins to the curb, the first indications are the plan is working. After only a few months of the program, city hall reports that Torontonians are recycling up to 10 or 15 per cent more garbage. In other words, Toronto’s Solid Waste Management Services says there’s up to 15 per cent less garbage going to landfill.
Maybe we should investigate the potential of introducing these mega Blue Bins here … as long as they’re large enough to take discarded sofas.
