Deborah Barnard
Supervisor, Waste Enforcement
Toronto/East York
433 Eastern Avenue, Bldg. B, 2nd Floor
Toronto, ON M4M 1B7
Office - (416) 392-7680
Fax - (416) 392-0762
>>> Jutta Mason 03/19/2007 10:48 PM >>>
Dear Waste Watch newsletter editor,
I enjoy reading your newsletter and it often has very interesting bits of information in it. But I don't get the item in your latest edition, that says it's against the law for people to pick bottles out of other people's recycling bins.

Why on earth would that be? There are people in my neighbourhood who make an income like that, and good for them, if they can pick re-usable stuff out of my throw-aways.

Does the City government actually spend money sending by-law officers around to catch such scavengers? Please tell me it isn't so.

Jutta Mason

On 20-Mar-07, at 8:27 AM, SHEILA PIN wrote:

There are a couple of guys that come down our street regularly,and me and my neighbours go into the house to get empties for them. Frankly, they are doing me a service because I never get around to cleaning them out of my basement until the pile is overflowing anyway. sheila

I heard of this law some time ago, last year or earlier? at any rate I have never heard of any one being charged. The only time I mind is when people are banging around in the bins at 3 a.m. At any rate I think there should be a law against silly laws. John Dondertman

On 20-Mar-07, at 10:16 AM, D'Arcy Mackenzie wrote:

This is just a guess - but it may have to do with identity theft. Someone can go through your recycling to find personal information such as exists on financial statements, etc. If they get enough info they can open an account or get a credit card, and then they spend away .... Just a guess though

My main concern is that the "scavengers" should have a more stable, safe and dignified source of income.

As for the City's position, I think the reason is also economic. The City can only make money on some of the items it collects for recycling (such as aluminum cans, for which I believe it gets a good price). These are the same items "scavengers" are going after.

So from the City's point of view it is losing money from a service I'm assuming it would ultimately like to be self-financing, rather than being financed from general revenue (taxes, etc.). Raghu

I have a problem with that sort of reasoning, and it is this: You don't solve the problem by making someone's desperate financial measure illegal. That is like the people who want to make squeegee-kids or panhandling illegal because they say they want to get people off the streets. Such a "solution" just puts people in an even more desperate economic situation, and is at best only dealing with the symptom and not the underlying social problem that led to it in the first place.

As for the economic concern... well it is patently ridiculous to suggest that it is some sort of an injustice that scavenging homeless people are costing us some tiny amount of public revenue so that they can contribute to their subsistence living. Add to this the preposterous idea that the city might actually have paid employees who enforce this law, and you have a farce of extreme comical proportions. John

In case it wasn't clear in my post, I didn't say I supported the City's position. Jutta asked why the City took that position, and I thought I had part of the answer. Raghu

I just want to note that I once saw a young squeegee-kid hit by a car and thrown in the air when she turned quickly to get back to the sidewalk. It was definitely her fault and the driver who hit her was very shocked as was everyone around. As a result I was most definitely relieved when this activity was made illegal. Sometimes there are reasons we are not clear on as to why certain activities are not allowed. Maybe there is the risk of someone cutting themselves reaching into blue boxes, after all cans and can lids are stored in there as well as bottles and some people have been known to throw broken glass into the blue box. Personally I don't have any problem with anyone taking anything from my blue box, but it's worth finding out what the rationale is for the City's position. Vivienne

The city's concern about scavenging is not about glass, it is about aluminum. People take aluminum from blue boxes and sell it. It ends up in the same place as it would have had the city collected it, but the city doesn't get the money for the aluminum. This undermines the cost-effectiveness of the recycling programs, so they try to stop it. A few years ago there was a spike in the price of used cardboard ($350/ton !!) and scavengers started driving around on garbage night taking cardboard.

Jim McInnes

Thank you for your recent email and subsequent email sharing the comments of your community regarding the City of Toronto's Residential Collection By-law 844-20C wherein it states that, "No person shall pick over, interfere with, disturb, remove or scatter any waste set out for collection unless authorized to do so by the Commissioner". Removing LCBO deposit containers from other people's blue boxes is scavenging and is not permitted under the by-law. These containers were put out by residents for collection by the City and the City receives revenue for these containers. These revenues reduce system costs, which in turn reduces the amount of taxes required to operate the program. Where possible, the City will attempt to maximize its revenue and reduce system costs by returning containers in bulk for deposit redemption. I hope this information addresses your comments and the comments of your neighbours. Thank you for providing your feedback to our recent Waste Watch brochure. Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Cindy Harrison
Senior Projects Coordinator
Solid Waste Management Services
City of Toronto

Thanks for getting back to me so promptly, Ms.Harrison, and letting me know the number of the by-law. I can see that the City is serious about scavenging because they make income from what households put in the boxes.

As far as I can see, scavengers mostly take beer empties (and now wine empties) that have a refund on them. I guess many people can't be bothered to take them back to the beer store.

An interesting environmental equalizer is that if I take back my beer empties I tend to take them in the car, and recycling is picked up by trucks, whereas scavengers are walking and therefore use less fuel. So they may be helping, in a tiny way, with our Kyoto points. However if they're depriving the City of valuable income, that's a factor. Does your recycling department keep a record of how much income it derives from alcohol bottle/can returns?

Sorry to ask so many questions! But criminalizing scavenging is perhaps an issue for public discussion. One possible remedy is for people to put out an extra box marked: "free to anyone," which contains any donations they designate for people looking for deposit-containers. Am I right, that then those people would not be liable to being ticketed?

Jutta Mason

I recall this being an issue some years ago, [5? 10?] and it was to do with paper recycling rather than bottles. The value of paper recyclables had gradually increased & there were trucks cruising the danforth in the middle of the night collecting it all & then selling it to the same purchasers as the city. This activity was pretty large scale & yes, it was cutting into the city's profits, or at least into the feasability of an operation that has never actually generated net profits but does cover some of its costs. That is i think the origin of the law, and as far as i know it has not ever been used to go after your neighbourhood bottle-picker.

p

I was thinking about the bylaw. I have seen the garbage collectors sorting the bottles for their own version of scavenging. Does that count? Citizens aren’t allowed to scavenge but garbage collectors, since it is their job to take bottles out of our blue boxes, are allowed? How does this work? I suppose they feel justified. One garbage collector guy I spoke to called it “danger pay” or a “tip”.

Interesting.

Erella

I just heard about the ridiculous item in Waste Watch about the illegality of picking recyclables out of blue boxes etc. This is counterproductive, even according to the goals of the program itself isn't diversion from the waste stream the whole idea? I purposely leave my wine bottles etc. out for people to take, because I don't have a lot of time to deal with them myself and I know that somebody who could likely use the cash will take them. There are no ill effects that I'm aware of that arise from this practice. Silly.

Kathryn Scharf

Dear Ms. Scharf,

I am following up on your recent email regarding the City of Toronto's Residential Collection By-law 844-20C wherein it states that, "No person shall pick over, interfere with, disturb, remove or scatter any waste set out for collection unless authorized to do so by the Commissioner". Removing LCBO deposit containers from other people's blue boxes is scavenging and is not permitted under the by-law. These containers were put out by residents for collection by the City and the City receives revenue for these containers. These revenues reduce system costs, which in turn reduces the amount of taxes required to operate the program. Where possible, the City will attempt to maximize its revenue and reduce system costs by returning containers in bulk for deposit redemption. I hope this information addresses your comments. Thank you for providing your feedback to our recent Waste Watch brochure. Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Cindy Harrison
Senior Projects Coordinator
Solid Waste Management Services
City of Toronto
Toronto City Hall
25th Floor, East Tower
100 Queen Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5H 2N2
phone: 416-392-8219
fax: 416-392-4754
email: charris@toronto.ca

I still disagree with this policy. The deposit program for LCBO bottles is new, so how was the city funding the recycling program before? I think that the program was introduced to encourage container re-use, not to fund city programs.

My feeling is that until the bottles are picked up, they belong to me, though I'm sure the city will argue somehow that they do not, that once they are inserted in a blue box which technically belongs to the city they therefore belong to the city or some such. I guess the solution would be for me to lay the deposit bottles on my lawn or beside the blue box so as to facilitate their collection by scavengers.
kathryn

Hello Kathryn,

Thank you for your e-mail. The reason the scavenging by-law is in place goes well beyond the issue of the needy taking some LCBO containers out of Blue Boxes. Scavenging has been a major problem for the City at certain times in the past. The revenues received from the sale of Blue Box materials (e.g., newspapers, cardboard, aluminum cans etc.) offset some of the costs of the program. The market prices the City receives for these materials fluctuate based on market demand; when prices are low, the City still collects the material but receives less revenue; when market prices are high, the revenue received by the City can offset a larger portion of the costs. However, when market prices have become very high in the past, large-scale scavenging has taken place costing the City and its taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the prices of newspaper and cardboard were very high, commercial enterprises with trucks and paid crews were driving the streets in the middle of the night taking literally thousands of tonnes of newspapers out of residents' blue boxes. The City's trucks would then come along the next morning and pick up the lowered value materials; there would be no cost savings since the truck would still have to stop at each house, but there would be a whole lot of lost revenue. If the City chose to turn a blind eye to scavenging of LCBO containers, commercial enterprises could start wide-scale scavenging and take not only the deposit containers but also high-value containers such as aluminum cans. A lot of residents expect that the materials they sort out and put out for collection are collected and sold by the City to offset the cost of the program and ultimately their taxes. Our issue is not with the odd needy person removing some LCBO deposit containers, it is the potential sabotaging of the program if scavenging becomes wide-spread. I hope that sheds some light on our policy and of course, it is certainly your prerogative to give your deposit containers to whoever you wish.

Tim Michael
Manager, Waste Diversion
Solid Waste Management Services
tmichae@toronto.ca

Hi Tim, I appreciate your answers, and will circulate it to the others on our local neighbourhood list-serve who were debating/speculating about the possible reasons for this by-law. I must confess I had no idea that newsprint and cans had become such high value items. In a big picture way, I take comfort in this fact, as the story always used to be that there was no market for recyclables, and the suspicion that circulated was therefore that they ended up in landfill as a result. I do see that if we have a functional municipal recycling program in place that it helps if it is financially sustainable.

Re: poor people scavenging. The reason to pursue it at all was a question of principle, with little practical application, as I know that the truth of the matter is that almost no bylaws are enforced (e.g. idling, noise, dumping), and were they in this case, there would be no enforcible penalty since the people could not pay the fines. regards,
kathryn

The neighbours on this list may recall a recent thread relating to scavengers picking things out of the recycling boxes. There's an interesting Globe story this morning (Steve Rennie, A7, "Deposit return program cuts Toronto revenues"). It sounds as though the province's new alcohol bottle deposit return program may be an even worse threat to Toronto's recycling income than the blue box trash pickers are. There will be less glass to sell, the City's trucks will have to make the same number of stops even if the blue boxes are less full, and scavengers will be more avid to pick over the boxes. The mayor says the City stands to lose several million dollars because of the bottle return program.

Toronto -- a city of woes.

Meantime, there's a guy with makeshift paniers on his rickety bike who picks the bottles out of blue boxes on my block. Mayssan Shuja says there's an old Chinese lady with a shopping cart on St.Clarens. There are no opportunist industrial-scale scavenging trucks in sight here yet. If they come, a couple of well-placed upward-facing nails on the road may help. (License plate numbers reported to Tim Michael tmichae@toronto.ca, the Waste Diversion manager, might be a good alternative.) But so far, what the City loses on recycling income around here, they may gain on fewer welfare applications. Of course, that would mean fewer jobs for welfare workers, and if the old lady doesn't declare her scavenging income, that means no taxes are paid. But some local grocery store will benefit if she uses her bottle-money there to buy food.....unless she tries to stretch her money at Wal-Mart.

Nothing is simple!

Jutta

The story is even more complicated. John Barber had an interesting piece "Riding the blue box at half price" in the Globe and Mail's Toronto section this past Saturday (April 14) which I recommend to anyone interested in recycling issues. In it he links the introduction of blue boxes to the demise of local bottlers who used refillable pop bottles (remember them). The bigger problem he argues is the waste producing businesses like Tim Hortons who don't have to pay for all the garbage they make. The upcoming 20 minute clean up that the city is promoting is just another band-aid on a big problem.