What to recycle, trash in Toronto

City launching new online tool to answer questions
Type in your item and find out what goes in blue bin, organics and garbage
By Kris Scheuer

I write about garbage, recycling and organics. A lot.
I have dug through rotting trash for stories to find out why people in Toronto still put so much garbage at the curb. And I am still confused at times about what can be recycled and what has to be trashed.
To make the whole mess simpler, the city has launched a new web search tool. See it for yourself.
Let’s pick five items as examples: cooking oil, human hair, TV, dental floss and plastic bags.

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City going green with organic bins

Foul odours turn off some
Toronto implements green bins for residents
By Kris Scheuer
(Originally written Oct. 18/2004 for Town Crier.)
This is a look back at to an article I wrote five years ago as the city now grapples with how to roll out organic waste collection for apartment dwellers…

Councillor Jane Pitfield and Geoff Rathbone, the director of policy and planning for Toronto’s works department, introduce the green bin.

You couldn’t have helped noticing a big, 45-litre green bin delivered to your door recently, in preparation for the city’s new organic garbage collection program starting in the former Toronto, York and East York the week of Oct. 18/04.
Inside the bin are two things: an info sheet telling you what can and can’t go into the green bin and a small beige indoor container for kitchen scraps, which can then be dumped into the outdoor bin.

Toronto trash full of recyclables

Residential trash 80 percent full of recyclables Town Crier audit shows
That’s prior to summer 2009 garbage strike
By Sandie Benitah, Kris Scheuer and Eric McMillan
(Originally published in Town Crier Feb. 07 as a follow-up to a Dec/05 story)

Eric McMillan sorts thru 40 bags of residential trash. Pile on right is recyclables.

A year later, nothing has changed.
At the end of 2005, a Town Crier analysis of household garbage showed about 80 percent of what we were throwing out as trash could easily have been recycled in blue boxes and green bins.
In the year since then the disposal of Toronto’s million tonnes of garbage has been a major issue, with fights over whether to incinerate it, ship it to Michigan or bury it near London.
Here’s a suggestion: Just recycle it.
Twelve months after our original survey, the Town Crier has found that — still — most of our so-called garbage is recyclable.
For two weeks reporters collected garbage bags left at residential curbsides in Toronto: 40 bags in total, five selected randomly from each of our eight coverage areas.