Litter in the city

BY LIZ DEWDNEY

On a crisp January day a Toronto bike courier was locking her bike up in Toronto’s Kensington Market. While she was doing this she saw a man throw a piece of garbage out his car window. She took offence. After walking over to the slow moving car she opened the door and threw the garbage back in. The man driving the car then got out and threw two large coffees at the courier. A screaming match ensued, which eventually escalated into a physical fight.While the courier, Leah Hollinsworth, admits that she may have gone overboard that day, she says she’ll never shy away from speaking her mind to litterers.

“I’ll always say something when I see people littering,” she said, “I take it personally.”

A local photographer caught much of the incident on camera; he posted the photos on multi-user blog called Citynoise. The story was quickly picked up by mainstream media and resulted in a heated debate about littering in Toronto.

Litter has always been a problem for major urban centres. McDonald’s wrappers, coffee cups, chewing gum and cigarette buts litter the streets despite street cleaners and garbage bins. Litter drastically changes the urban landscape and, according to Glen Stone public affairs manager with the Toronto Board of Trade, litter can even hurt a city’s economy.

“One little piece of litter is going to do damage,” he said. “It makes a city less attractive to tourists and businesses.”

Two years ago the Toronto Board of Trade partnered with the city, school boards and business improvement area to create a program called Can the Litter. Through educational and advertorial programs, Can the Litter hopes to help the city reduce the amount of litter on Toronto streets.

Geoff Rathbone currently works for the city as the director of policy and planning in the solid waste department, he has worked in solid waste management for over 20 years. He believes that litter has always been a problem for the city, but that it has become more prevalent since he’s been on the job.

“People’s consumption patterns have changed in the past 20 years,” he said. “The sheer availability of potential litter has increased.”

Rathbone also points out that municipal government has taken many initiatives in the past four years to try to curb litter. For example, the litter audit actually measures the amount of litter found on Toronto streets.

The first such audit was done in 2002 with another conducted every two years. The results show a decrease of 40 per cent in 2006 from the 2002 audit.

Rathbone credits the decrease to both city programs and private ones such as Can the Litter. He also says that the city plans to bring in many more programs in the future.

Eventually Rathbone would like to see a four-pronged approach to littering, three of which, prevention, education and cleaning are already in use. The fourth would be enforcement, i.e. ticketing people who are caught littering the streets. Though there technically is a $305 fine for littering in Toronto, offenders are rarely ticketed, Rathbone says, this city is not ready for a heavy ticketing blitz. For example, he says cigarette butts, which made up almost 15 per cent of the litter in the 2006 audit, are difficult to dispose of properly in public areas.

“We’ve pushed all the smokers outside,” he said. “It would be very unfair to ticket them unless we put in some public ashtrays.”

In the meantime, both Rathborn and Stone hope that citizens and community groups will help to make the streets of Toronto as clean as possible.

Though Rathborn wouldn’t necessarily encourage others to do what outspoken courier Hollinsworth did, he says he admires her conviction.

“You’ve got to respect her for standing up for the cleanliness of her neighborhood like that,” he said.

For her part, Hollinsworth continues to speak to people about littering whenever she sees it. She also teaches her eight-year-old son about littering. Every day when she picks him up from school, mother and son take a few minutes to pick up garbage they find on the schoolyard.

Though she doesn’t believe that the city or anyone else can change the behaviour of a litterer, she says that she doesn’t understand the behaviour in the first place.

“It seems like such a simple thing,” she said, “to just keep that piece of garbage in your pocket until you find a trash can, but people just throw it on the ground.”