Toronto plans binning ban

TORONTO -- Starting the evening before recycling day and often working all night in neighbourhoods throughout Toronto, scruffy-looking scavengers armed with dilapidated shopping carts sift through the city's blue bins, grabbing beer and liquor bottles to return for refunds.

It's a trade that city officials are planning to stamp out.

They may seem mostly harmless, but the view from city hall is that these scavengers are costing taxpayers money by stealing material - especially valuable aluminum cans - that the city would otherwise sell to recycling firms.

And the head of the city's solid waste department, Geoff Rathbone, told The Globe and Mail the city plans to act as early as this fall.

"A lot of people tend to think it's providing cash to homeless individuals, whatever, but from a solid-waste perspective, we do want to crack down on it," Mr. Rathbone said, acknowledging that the city does not yet have a firm estimate on how much money scavengers are costing the blue-bin system.

Once the material is at the curb, Mr. Rathbone said, it is legally city property, adding that the city won a court case a few years ago against companies that were scavenging cardboard from blue boxes when prices for that commodity shot up.

City officials say they actually have to pay $12.50 a tonne for a private company to process the city's mixed, broken glass so it can be recycled.

However, the city stands to lose money from the scavenging of aluminum cans, the most valuable of its recyclables, which it sells for more than $2,000 a tonne.

Under consideration, he said, is an enforcement blitz by city bylaw inspectors, who currently have the authority to issue a $360 ticket to anyone caught sifting through or taking garbage or recyclables left by the curb. While the city did not have statistics yesterday, it is believed that very few such charges are ever laid.