Big new blue bins, motivated residents combine to divert more from landfill

Print

E-mail

Text

Scarborough homeowners have taken to their new wheeled recycling bins like the proverbial ducks to water according to city solid waste staff. New numbers show that Scarborough's recycling rate has increased by as much as 15 per cent in the new bins first three months in the driveway.

The survey from Toronto's solid waste department marks the first real data on how the new blue bins are affecting behaviour, because Scarborough was the first part of the city in which the bins were rolled out.

And the numbers are up, between 10 and 15 per cent per household.

If those numbers are extrapolated city-wide, Toronto's Director of Solid Waste Services Geoff Rathbone said Torontonians would be diverting another 20,000-30,000 tonnes of recycling materials that would otherwise be going to landfill.

"That is the equivalent of taking 3,500 street garbage trucks off the road," said Rathbone. "And because about 70 per cent of that is fibre, that equates to 240,000 and 300,000 additional trees that would be saved each year."

Rathbone said that the likely reason for the more dramatic recycling is simply because most of the bins are bigger than the smaller blue boxes that residents are being asked to give up.

"The large bin is the most popular in Scarborough - it's in the range of 70 per cent of the bins we've given out," said Rathbone.

Torontonians are being given the choice of small bins, large, and extra-large. The smallest hold the equivalent of two blue boxes; the extra large, the equivalent of six.

"In general, what I'd say is that people have more capacity now than they did in the past," said Rathbone.

Scarborough residents were also the most optimistic in the city, when the second shoe of the city's new waste diversion program dropped earlier this year - that being the graduated sizes of garbage bin that will determine how much a homeowner pays for garbage collection.

Some 40 per cent of Scarborough households chose the smallest bin - one that holds just one bag of garbage to be collected every two weeks. That number was significantly higher than the city had estimated.

Rathbone said that in many cases, it was because Scarborough homeowners weren't able to see just how little the smallest bin holds.

Other parts of the city are being more conservative in their diversion expectations, said Rathbone. But in other parts of the city, residents are still going 'large' when it comes to recycling bins.

In the area bounded by Yonge Street and Victoria Park, Rathbone said that slightly more residents are actually going for the extra-large recycling bin - in spite of the fact that many of the east-end Toronto homes there don't actually have the space to store them.

Ward 30 (Toronto Danforth) Councillor Paula Fletcher has been dealing with the storage issues since the bins started to get delivered this spring.

She said she expects the diversion rates will go up in her Riverdale neighbourhoods as much as Scarborough's - but the process may be more painful there.

"The problem has never been that people don't want to recycle - it's in dealing with the expectation that recycling is easier with the new bin but for some people it gets harder," she said. "All we've been doing since these bins have rolled out is work to accommodate the residents with containers that work with the nature of the housing."

Rathbone said that solid waste staff have been out in the older Toronto neighbourhoods dealing with homes on a one-on-one basis. So far 400 households have been allowed to opt out of the blue bin program, instead putting their recycling out in clear bags.

In the meantime, staff are handing out the new blue bins in the last few homes in Etobicoke, while the garbage bin roll-out continues through Scarborough and then into North York, East York, the Beaches and Riverdale.

The city will be on the full pay-as-you-throw system by the end of the year.