If City Won't Pickup Household Trash

Or charges residential property owners extra, another hidden tax, where will the excess garbage go? Any guesses? In front of your neighbor's home, in the trash collectors on main thoroughfares, in local parks, by the side of highways, empty lots, etc. where additional resources and cost will result. A city which can't balance it's books will once again expand their unionized workforce by having to hire trashgestapo.

Curbing trash
February 17, 2007
Jim Byers
CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF

It's not easy being green.

City council in fall 2005 voted to begin reducing the number of garbage bags that residents can put by the curb from six bags every two weeks to five and then four, starting April 1, 2007. But councillors failed to put money in the 2006 budget for the workers needed to ensure compliance, so the six-bag limit stayed.

A community newspaper recently quoted a city official as saying the limit was about to drop to four bags. The city's Access Toronto information office told the paper the limit was six bags, then said it had actually dropped to five. When the Toronto Star asked Access Toronto yesterday, a worker said the limit was six items of garbage, including recycling bins.

For the record, the city's acting general manager of solid waste management, Geoff Rathbone, yesterday explained the limit remains six bags every two weeks, not including recycling bins. But he said the city is determined to slash the amount of garbage going to landfills and there's another request to the budget committee this year for staff to enforce a reduced bag limit. A report on reducing the bag limit will go back to a council committee in the coming weeks, Rathbone said.