I'm the Bin Man

Not another play on Osama Ben Laden and not another arctic adventure: just a trivial domestic observation. (Although it occurs to me that I have several more arctic stories to relate. Ask me about shotguns...)

Today was garbage day on my street. Between a variety of municipal garbage initiatives I now have seven bins to place garbage into and a rather complicated two week cycle of pickup dates.

In the kitchen:

• Under-counter old skool garbage bin.
• Top-of-counter compost bin.
• Small Green Bin for other organic waste

On the front porch:

• Blue Bin for glass, metal, some plastics.
• Grey Bin for paper recyclables. Both collected every two weeks.

Behind the house:

• Old-skool garbage bin (collected alternate weeks).
• Big Green Bin to hold the organics when they're too smelly for the kitchen and picked up every week.
• And I guess my garden composter makes eight.

The Green Bin part of the program has only recently kicked in, and the poor garbage men are having a tough time keeping their old schedules. In the old days my pick-up would happen around 9:00 AM. Now sometimes they don't arrive until well after dark! I hope they're making good money...

Why the big push? Our local landfill sites are effectively full, and getting a new landfill approved is nearly impossible. At the moment Toronto's garbage is being shipped 500 miles across the border into a US landfill in Michigan. So diverting garbage from this expensive and possibly short-lived destination is becoming a municipal obsession. And it's good for mother nature.

Every little bit helps, so I've become a dedicated sorter of rubbish, look for low-waste packaging and other such choices. I actually only drag my various bins to the curb once a month, and even then they are often not very full.