November 20th, 2007 · No Comments

By John DeFore

Plenty of cities these days have some sort of recycling program for residential customers. But where does that leave the urbanite who eats takeout meals away from home, reads the morning paper at Starbucks, and downs a quick soda on the way from the train station to the office? Few of us are willing to lug those empty containers back home, and businesses with available recycling bins are almost unheard of.

For years, Toronto has been doing the obvious: Throughout the city, wastebaskets on street corners have been replaced by simple three-compartment bins, with one container for garbage, one for paper, and one for bottles and cans. They’re so close at hand you’d have to make a conscious effort not to recycle your waste.

The city’s General Manager of solid waste services, Geoff Rathbone, is understandably proud of the program, which has planted 4,500 three-bin boxes across the city (with 500 regular trash cans picking up the slack). He has been told Toronto’s is the largest such program in the world, though a few other towns in Ontario have followed their neighbor’s lead.

Getting things rolling didn’t cost the city a dime: In 2000, Toronto allowed an advertising company to install boxes, at their own expense, that carried the same kind of messages already seen on other public property. The government got a share of the revenue, some free civic-minded ads, and suddenly had the most conspicuous Green campaign on the continent.

The city takes care of collection, of course, but Rathbone is quick to point out that “we were already collecting this material — we were just taking it to a landfill,” at a cost of around $70 a ton. Now, the trucks that empty bins are themselves multi-segmented, and “more than half of what goes in litter bins” gets sold to recyclers. After taking into account those sales and the fees paid by manufacturers who use recyclable containers — fees that replaced an old deposit/return system which retailers have fought around the United States as well — he says it costs “almost nothing” to process the city’s recycling.

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