City’s street garbage bins are a waste

Thestar.com
May 22, 2017
Jack Lakey

If anyone needed proof that Toronto’s curvy plastic waste bins are a disaster, a number in a report to city council tells the sorry tale.

In the most recent one-year reporting period, the report says that 75.7 per cent of all requests from the public for servicing of street furniture were about waste bins in need of repair or cleaning.

A total of 10,342 requests were made between Sept. 1, 2016 and Aug. 31, 2017 -- more than one request for each of the 9,580 bins provided at the halfway point of a 20-year contract with Astral Out-of-Home, the city’s street furniture partner.

Complaints about damaged bins in need of repair totalled 8,764, or 64.2 per cent, while 1,578 requests were made for cleaning of bins, totalling 11.6 per cent.

To put it in perspective, the city’s 4,993 transit shelters generated 2,668 service requests for cleaning or maintenance, the second-biggest number after waste receptacles, at 19.7 per cent of the total.

“The maintenance and state of good repair of litter bins continues to be a challenge,” said the annual report to city council’s public works committee, a well-crafted understatement if ever there was.

“A combination of greater-than-anticipated use from urban density and pedestrian activity, as well as customized designs with moving parts, have led to a significant number of service requests.”

At least a half-dozen years ago, we wrote that the first and second generation of bins that were specially designed for Toronto streets were outstanding, as long as nobody used them.

In areas with high pedestrian traffic, they fell apart within a year or so. The pedals connect to a cord that opens the flaps over the holes, but the cord in between often stretched with regular use, so the flaps didn’t open, or the pedal broke.

After a couple years, the side panels started to shift and fall off, exposing the innards of the bins and making them targets for vandalism by knuckleheads.

The city and Astral have stubbornly clung to a narrative that the bins aren’t so bad. But in the last few years, they have begun installing smaller bins without flaps or pedals, and with fewer side panels.

Even now, the report says that Astral intends to salvage some of the curvy bins by removing the pedals and cords, which means people will have to push open the flaps to deposit refuse.

Ironically, the main selling point when they first appeared was that people could open the flaps by stepping on the pedal, sparing them the need to touch the filthy covers over the holes.

If it wasn’t obvious before, the report confirms the bins are a total failure.

But for taxpayers, there’s far more good news in the report than bad; all street furniture costs are borne by Astral, while the city rakes in a nice buck by sharing ad revenue with it. More on that in our Thursday column.