By Heather Mallick

Copyright thestar

It is either shocking to hear or extremely obvious that almost nothing we put in Toronto’s 10,500 ugly plastic public two-slotted litter bins is recycled. Your opinion depends on whether you’re idealistic or realistic.

In the same way that most Torontonians are neither left wing nor right wing, people who put litter in the recycling slot or plastic in the litter slot don’t care either way. They congratulate themselves for a) voting in municipal elections at all and b) getting garbage off the street, whatever the gods may decide its future will be.

Toronto’s garbage chief is Charlotte Ueta, “Acting Director of Policy, Planning & Outreach, Solid Waste Management Services Division.” Imagine trying to live up to a grand title like that when people, tourists included, cannot complete a minor public task.

Clearly the city believes garbage is a massive bureaucratic problem. But citizens think garbage is simple. As I often remind my readers, the anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose book “Purity and Danger” I urge you to read, aptly describes dirt as “matter out of place.”

In Toronto, our litter is wrongly placed, therefore befouled. It violates borders; dog dirt mixes with soft plastic which then mixes with waxed cardboard, two of the previous being verboten if I grasp the rules correctly which I probably don’t.

As the Star’s City Hall Bureau Chief Ben Spurr writes, less than one per cent of our yearly 5,000 tonnes of total garbage will be rescued and made anew. “Any recoverable material is either so dirty or mixed in with nonrecyclable items that it’s impractical to extract, and it ends up in landfill.”

In other words, we are a mess. True enough. I try not to walk anywhere on Thursdays, which is garbage pickup day in my neighbourhood, because the rows of bins left open smell of ancient death and rot, unspeakable fluids and detestable solids. Homeowners don’t clean their bins.

No wonder the garbage collectors are in a temper. No wonder they despise us. We are thoughtless; we have no moral follow-through.

There are better ways to collect recyclables. We might try bottle banks where people can dispose of glass and cans only, with special slots that only accept tube shapes (like kindergarteners putting shapes in the correct holes).

But we’d mess that up too. You know dog owners would put their little green bags in the holes. What wastrels people are, so busy coping with inflation, job loss, the widening collapse of global peace, and the wild-eyed park dweller and his mean child currently approaching them in the park with a hammer, oh just pick a slot.

Ueta says she won’t remove the “recycling” slot even though it’s only aspirational. As she told Spurr, the city would rather “promote positive behaviour and actually (get) folks utilizing the recycling compartment” properly. We want to build on the successes and just enhance it with more public education.” Awww.

This mirrors the battle over speed cameras. Raging drivers hate them even though they only affect speeders, and have serially cut them down, like angry babies throwing the shapes-in-holes game across the room. Even disconnected speed cameras work as reminders, just like Recycling slots.

Ueta’s using therapy-speak, the kind of jargon that guidance counsellors use on those recalcitrant stabby preteens we hear so much about. But she’s not wrong. We are adults. It’s a minimal ask. Can we not try?

What we really need is three slots in those bins, which should be made of metal, not plastic to set a planet-friendly example. The first should read FILTHY, the second PLASTIC AND PAPER, and the third FOR GOD’S SAKE YOU PEOPLE.

Politically, this would mean PASSIONATE INTENSITY-RIGHT for dirty realism, PASSIONATE INTENSITY-LEFT for recyclables, and LACKS ALL CONVICTION for people who can’t decide.

Look, I got an anti-war quote from Yeats’ The Second Coming into a column explaining trash-sorting to civilians. I did it to prove that yes, you can indeed earn a living from not one but two University of Toronto liberal arts degrees. You’re welcome.