Bill Carroll came roaring back from his week in Québec, where they don’t recylce, just dump all their garbage in one bag and out it goes, back to Toronto, the city that recycles the most in North America (apparently, and I believe it), to challenge the most comatose bunch of taxpayers this side of the Atlantic, that if they’re really angry, really fed up, really truly livid about City Council’s inane garbage bin idea (and today its new land transfer and vehicle taxes) to e-mail him and the Mayor.

He gave out both his e-mail (bill.carroll@cfrb.com) and the Mayor’s e-mail (mayor_miller@toronto.ca) addresses and said that if he received 100 e-mails, sent to both the Mayor and him, on this issue (meaning of course, we’re against the Council on this plan), then he will continue to talk about it. If he didn’t, he’d forever shut up (I couldn’t imagine Bill shutting up permanently about garbage, but…).

This morning he announced that never in his decades of broadcasting has he ever seen this kind of response. When he signed off yesterday morning, I seriously doubted that he’d get the 100 e-mails he requested, especially since so many didn’t write to the Mayor, just to him, and he stated categorically he was ignoring those ones in his count. He was only counting e-mails to both. People flooded him, the station, and his producer. Apparently of the over 600 he received, only 2 were negative, and they were personal attacks. Way to defend the Council’s plan — attack the person, not the message. As he said, just proves the plan is indefensible.

So as I’ve said before, ad nauseum, the Council’s handling of garbage is environmentally unfriendly. Landfills are old school and unfriendly. Trucking garbage to Michigan pollutes the air far more than any incinerator. Trucking it to the new landfill is, I bet you dollars to doughnuts, more air unfriendly than incineration.

Bins are harder to empty into garbage trucks than tossing in garbage bags, thus a guaranteed way to increase the injury rate of garbage workers. I’ve heard several Torontonians are going to purchase trash compactors in order to fit all their trash into the tiny bin so as to ensure Council’s claim of being revenue neutral remains true. That means the bins will be extrememly heavy, and union workers are going to injure their backs (especially those ones who get all pissy about having to pick up the garbage from a step right next to the sidewalk — the less height you have to lift a heavy object, the less likely you will to injure your back moron — but I digress).

Those who purchase the large bins and then don’t fill them every week will take to putting their recycling into it since they’re paying for it anyway and will mean less work on their part. The microchops Glenn De Baeremaeker threaten to put in the bins to track people (very Orwellian) will be broken out within weeks since Toronto garbage workers chuck the bins back anywhere on the street once they’ve dumped their contents into the trucks.

I stopped using my bin for two reasons — I didn’t have the strength nor energy to carry or drag a bin. The garbage bag was lighter. And worse, the idiot workers would leave it right side up and guess who would mistake it for a park bin? Yup. Dog walkers on poop patrol. If I don’t fold over the yard bags, they’ll use those too.

The usual suspects, plus some newbies, will fill parks and wild spaces with their garbage even more than they do now in an effort to avoid the increased taxes and just because, quite frankly, it’s simpler than all the sorting.

Mechanical sorting plants do a far more efficient and better job of sorting garbage into its component parts than any human, except for the green fanatics. Now perhaps Glenn De Baeremaeker (e-mail councillor_debaeremaeker@toronto.ca) because he’s single and extremely fit, being able to bike to City Hall from Scarborough every day, has all the time and ability in the world to jump through all these hurdles, to carry the green bin, the soon-to-be giant blue bin (oh, did you forget? We’re getting giant blue bins too.), the garbage bin and doesn’t give a toss about those who cannot. His arrogance makes me realise why people in wheelchairs hold those press events where they put a politician in a wheelchair for the day just so they can finally know what it’s like, being as they’re completely lacking in imagination and compassion to figure it out for themselves. Glenn De Baeremaeker shows no regard for those who cannot carry or open and close bins, no understanding for the time-strapped, and no tolerance for families. I’ve never understood some singles’ resentful attitude towards families. We all have our own way of living, and its punitive and mean-spirited to use your power to attack another person’s way of living. His kind of zealotry reminds of born-again Christians, you know, those ones who raise their hands to the sky and go on about seeing Jesus, while ignoring their fellow Christian sitting right next to them.

Toronto is at risk of power outages, and we have a renewable resource right here in our city to ensure we can supply our own electricity. The solar panel installation soon to be down at the lakeshore will only supply 200 homes. The windmills don’t supply any sort of critical mass. Our garbage is a far better alternative to using a non-renewable resource like natural gas. And quite frankly all this talk about incinerators being air polluters is ridiculous in the face of the massive waves of pollution wafting up from Ohio and in the face of the clean and green incinerators being used in Europe. Do people die off in thousands from air pollution in Sweden like they do here? Do they have smog? They have 30 incinerators. They should be dying off in truckloads if Council is right about incinerators. Landfills give off greenhouse gases too people. Yet Council seems to think that that pollution is A-OK.

In a nutshell, the Council with this one-two punch will gut this city. If I have mused about moving out, I who am a diehard Torontonian, then many will actually make that move. We have long known that Toronto cannot sustain higher taxes and higher service fees. That’s why the province supposedly forced us to start cutting business taxes and City Council has a history of keeping tax increases low. The tax rates led to a critically high vacancy rate and gutting of our industrial sectors. We’ve only just begun to get back on our feet. But this so-called green plan, in addition to the land sales tax, will guarantee an exodus and guarantee stagnancy in those areas bordering the 905 region. And it won’t increase recycling rates because they’re already stupendously high in thise city — among homeowners, the only ones being hit by this plan. City Council is supposed to serve Toronto, not attack it and help the other governments make it into Detroit of the north. Now what are you going to do about it?

Related posts:

1. Wow, We Did It!
2. You Get to Pay for your Garbage Bin Next Year
3. Garbage Bins
4. Garbage Sorting Mistakes in the Parks
5. Mr Garbage: Bins Are More Esthetically Pleasing Than Sunny Porches, Flowers, and Lawns