The day I have been dreading has finally arrived. Yesterday, a flyer arrived in the mail from the City of Toronto requiring the Carrick family to decide about our future garbage handling requirements. Specifically, we have to choose the size of bins we will need and the resulting extra charge this will entail.
The City of Toronto will be providing us with two shiny new bins, a grey one for normal garbage and a blue one for recycling material. These are in addition to the green bin which is meant for composting material. Donna has left the task of deciding on the size of bins that are right for our family up to me. I already know the answer, as big as possible.
In our block, we’re the garbage kings. We have to go out really early in the morning on garbage day to take all of our plastic bags to the curb. This is to avoid the embarrassment of having the neighbours see how much we have to discard. This is in addition to the current small blue bin which we religiously fill every two weeks.
Depending on the size of the new bins, there may or may not be extra dollars involved. There’s some mumbo-jumbo in the flyer about taking the garbage collection charge out of taxes. However, if your family’s choice of bins is super-sized, there will be an additional fee and the net effect will be an increase in the total payment. Plus there are additional charges for tags to allow extra bags.
The Carrick family does recycle, but maybe not quite as conscientiously as some other people. I have not been totally pleased with garbage collection in our city for some time now anyway. Garbage is only picked up once every two weeks. When there is a holiday, it is anybody’s guess when the next pickup will be. Also, our offerings are sometimes rejected. I can only assume that the collection trucks are now equipped with portable x-ray machines to ensure that unsuitable materials are not passed off as grade-A.
Furthermore, I’ve always been a little sceptical about the whole recycling business. Toronto currently sends its refuse to Michigan, but this cross-border access will terminate in 2010. One can easily understand why Michigan might not want Toronto’s leftovers. However, this leaves Toronto with another, smaller dump site near London Ontario. To stretch out the lifetime of this location, recycling is going to have to rise to 70% of the total from the current level of 42%. This is the reason for the new-sized bins, to encourage more recycling and less of the usual household waste.
The Carricks spend a lot of time driving around in areas of the province north of Toronto. I happen to know that beyond Barrie and Orillia, all the way to Hudson’s Bay, and both east to Ottawa and west to Winnipeg, there lies a land mass the size of Russia – if that’s an exaggeration, then it’s at least the size of two Germanies, a France and an Iceland – that has very little evidence of mankind in it.
I doubt that the population density of northern Ontario is as high as one person per square kilometre. There has got to be somewhere up there that we can leave stuff to rot. Five million people are being inconvenienced so as not to disturb what are mainly rocks, trees, moose and fish. I’m aware that this way of thinking is not politically correct and that David Suzuki would be very disappointed in me.
I know people who skulk around strip malls at night looking for unguarded dumpsters in which to discard their extra refuse. While I admire them, I don’t have their nerve. It would be too humiliating to get caught. I can see the headlines now, “Stakeout at Dumpster Leads to High-profile Arrest”. Maybe I’m flattering myself. Just the same, I know that my picture would be used to sell newspapers and that would lead to more recycling.
It has crossed my mind, however, to simply have a dumpster installed outside our kitchen window. On the surface of it, this would make life easier. But there would be one major drawback. I’d have to ride shotgun all night to keep the neighbours away.
Thank goodness the new bins are really big. They are an impressive and formidable sight when you see them lined up in a row along the curb on collection day. They even come with wheels. I’m not sure they’ll fit inside our garage along with the Jeep.
The grey one looks like it could just about handle a corpse. With the blue bin, we’ve had a stroke of luck. We’ve been able to rent it out as a residence to a really nice refugee family for six months of the year. It has an upstairs and a downstairs and there’s some talk about sub-letting. For the other six months of the year, our renters are counting on government assistance money to kick in and give them a lifestyle better than ours.
Like the soothsayers of old, I can read the entrails. A new era of garbage processing is upon us. Being realists, the Carricks will have to grow and adapt. On occasion, in the past, I have been accused of being too set in my ways. This isn’t fair. I’m really quite flexible, as long as everything stays the same.
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