New recycling program boasts early successes

The city’s director of collection services says early monitoring results show that Toronto’s new recycling program is a success. The first 100,000 households to receive the bins recycled 10 percent more between February and May than they did last year, Robert Orpin said yesterday.

“We’re ecstatic. This is what we envisioned with our program… We’re attributing it to the fact that we made recycling somewhat easier for people with the bins,” said Orpin, noting residents can now dump all their recycling into one container, which has wheels to make it easier to move and a lid to make it neater.

The first homes assessed are in Scarborough, which began getting the new blue bins in December. Many of them have placed orders for the smallest size of the grey garbage bins, which the city will begin delivering next month, Orpin said. That means they plan to dispose of the equivalent of only one small bag of garbage every two weeks – compared with the former Toronto average of 2.2 bags.

“It’s a real positive story in that sense. People have taken to it and it seems to be working,” Orpin said.

Of the 70 percent of Scarborough households that have so far placed orders for one of the four sizes of new grey wheeled garbage bins, 40 percent opted for the smallest, 75 litres – a “pleasant surprise,” said Orpin. “We thought it would be between 20 and 30 percent. We were even cautiously optimistic about that.” Thirty percent ordered the medium bin, 20 percent the large and 10 percent the extra-large.

The new program isn’t working for a small but growing number of households, however. Close to 400 homes have been exempted from using the bins, mostly in dense neighbourhoods where space shortages present storage issues. Homeowners with storage problems are advised to call the city’s dedicated hotline at 416.392.BINS.

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