Does anybody really know what garbage is?
Does anybody dare not care? Grey bins are a mystery pool of gloop, but if we don't sort through the city communiqués to try to understand what's in and what's out ... we're cooked
20Forget to be or not to be: The question is, does tinfoil go in the recycling bin? No, seriously, does it? And what about those clear plastic boxes of fancy lettuce?
Burning questions! Everyone in Toronto is watching their waste these days, now that it costs to have your trashes hauled - $39 a year for collection of a medium-sized grey garbage bin every two weeks, with only five grace bags a year for blowouts such as Christmas. But the rules are so arcane, it's enough to drive a citizen to drink (wine bottles, blue bin; screw tops, grey bin).
As of Dec. 8, as city council debates strict penalties to limit "single-use in-store packaging," Torontonians can add plastic bags to their blue boxes, along with foam polystyrene packaging and take-out food containers - the white "clamshell" that your rapidly cooling burrito rides home in.
The new measures could spare a year's worth of local landfill. That's a rare commodity for a city that currently sends nearly 80 trash trucks a day to Michigan, enough solid waste to almost fill the Rogers Centre over the course of a year. Except that, as with all things environmental, it's nowhere near that simple.
Yes, the hot-drink cup you get at Tim Hortons is made of recyclable paper.
But you can't recycle the cup in your blue box. That's partly because the cup always comes with a non-recyclable polystyrene lid.
With an estimated 365 million take-out cups sold every year in Toronto and then offloaded into the public-waste-management system, the city no longer wants to take on Timmys take-out trash (or that of any other retailer).
And yes, as of Dec. 8 you can recycle the plastic bags the supermarket gives you to carry away your groceries.
What you can't toss in your blue box in Toronto, given the counter-intuitive logic of the waste-management world, is a biodegradable bag. Biodegradable bags will contaminate the quality of the non-biodegradable plastic bags the city plans to sell to recyclers, and they take up space in landfill, which recycled bags do not. (As Glenn De Baeremaeker, the city councillor and enviro-zealot who chairs the city works committee said a few days ago, "It turns out plastic is a valuable resource." Biodegradable bags turn into dirt. "Is that what we want to do with a precious natural resource. Turn it into dirt?") You can, however, toss a biodegradable bag into the green box even though it will be mechanically extracted and tossed in the trash by the city. Are we confused yet?
The intricacies of what can and can't be recycled has created at least five recycling character types.
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