City officials are planning to crack down on people scavenging recyclables from blue bins. According to Toronto's Solid Waste Department, once the blue bin and its contents are curbside, the whole kit and caboodle is city property and they don't want anyone sorting through it.
You see, the city makes quite a bit of money off our aluminum cans ($2000 per tonne). Fair enough, but are these scavengers nicking empty pop cans? Anecdotal evidence (in the form of a couple of neighbourhood characters armed with shopping carts of varying constructions) shows that the scavengers are looking for wine and beer bottles. A cartful of finished Merlots and Tempranillos can net a tidy sum, especially in affluent neighbourhoods like mine where homeowners spend a lot on alcohol and can’t be bothered to make the trip to the Beer Store to return bottles.
(In the Beach, where I live, there are two LCBOs within walking distance of a large number of residents, including myself; however the Beer Store is a farther trek and therefore requires a bit more forethought than my usual, “Am I out of rosé? I think I’m out of rosé… I’ll just duck in for a bottle of rosé.” If the Liquor Store took back bottles, I could employ the empty one in, full one out method, based on the cold beer out, warm beer in method of university bar fridge drinking. But of course, the rosé bottles add up and require a large, strong bag in which to carry them, and a vehicle in which to transport them when there are too many in my kitchen cupboard not to be ashamed about.)
Why shouldn’t we let the enterprising unemployed continue with the sifting? Clifford Orwin compares it to the “biblical practice of gleaning”:
Leviticus 19.9 commands leaving the corners of one's fields unreaped so the poor can harvest them: One should never enjoy one's abundance to their exclusion. Similarly, I leave for the poor 20 cents of the value of every bottle of wine I buy. Collecting the bottle is their form of gleaning, and like gleaning in biblical days, it takes considerable labour.
There was a time when a city councillor wanted to ban panhandling: they found it somehow offensive, the homeless and unemployed sitting and begging for money. It annoyed people to be asked for money, to be reminded that we live in a many-tiered society, despite our many social nets. Why can't they get a job, asked some rather unempathetic citizens of our city.
Well, some have found jobs – jobs that don’t bother anyone (someone complained about the noise of scavengers, but give me a break – the industrial lawnmowers that rage at 8 o’clock in the morning outside my window are way worse) and help to support the province’s bottle return programme.
The City needs to stop worrying about who is returning my empty bottles of rosé and start worrying about more pressing issues.
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