Toronto’s busted bins mystery: Why are reports of broken bins higher on the west side of the city than anywhere else?

Thestar.com
April 25, 2022

There are only so many good ways to start a story, and one of those ways is this. A stranger arrives in a strange place and spies something -- never fully out in front, always in the corner of his eye -- that isn’t quite right.

That’s how the story of the banged-up bins began for me, last summer, when I moved to the west side of Toronto after eight years in a rental near the Danforth.

At first everything seemed perfect out west. Beautiful parks. Wonderful neighbours. The empanadas? Divine. But the more I walked around, the more something seemed off. It wasn’t until a Thursday in September, though, that it finally clicked for me.

I remember it clearly. It was recycling day. I was walking home, looking at a parade of blue bins stretching down the sidewalk, when I realized something: Those bins had been beat to hell.

In more than 10 years in Toronto, I had never seen anything like it. It wasn’t every bin, but it was close to half. Cracked bins. Smashed bins. Scuffed bins. Bins with breaks punched through the lid. Bins with no lids at all. Bins that looked cleaved nearly in two.

Photos of damaged recycling bins taken in the Toronto neighbourhoods a Star analysis shows have the most per capita bin complaints in the city. Richard Warnica. Dec. 2, 2021.

And it wasn’t just that street. Broken bins were everywhere in my new neighbourhood. There were so many I started keeping a running tally. What I began to notice was that the breaks weren’t random. There was a pattern. On a typical bin, it looked as if something had struck the front centre of the lid, hard, cracking the plastic or punching a hole right through. The sides were often damaged too. Many seemed almost squeezed, as if something had gripped either side and bent the plastic in, often beyond the point of breaking.

The longer I lived in the neighbourhood, the more streets I explored, the more bashed bins I saw. I became a kind of connoisseur of battered lids, cracked frames and DIY fixes. At a certain point, my curiosity began to boil over. I had rarely seen a damaged bin on the east side. Out west, they were everywhere. I had to get to the bottom of it. I needed to know what was happening to all these bins.

To try to find out, my colleague Andrew Bailey and I collected a decade’s worth of 311 complaint data from the City of Toronto related to damaged recycling, garbage and compost bins. Bailey then mapped those complaints by postal code.

What we found was both obvious and complicated. On the one hand, it was clear I wasn’t seeing things. The number of damaged bin complaints in my new neighbourhood really was, and has consistently been, significantly higher than it was in my old one. In fact, I seem to have moved directly into the Hurricane Alley of busted bins in Toronto.

In 2021, only five districts in Toronto (what are known as “forward sortation areas,” or FSAs) had a bin complaint rate of more than 50 per 1,000 occupied dwellings. Those five districts are connected, in a line that runs roughly southwest from Hwy. 401 west of Yonge Street to College Street east of Ossington. My postal code is right in the middle of that zone.

What the data didn’t show, though, is why. How are so many bins getting damaged in such similar ways? And solving that puzzle proved a little trickier.

According to the city, the answer is mostly nature and topography. It involves wind tunnels, tiny creatures, snowbanks, steep streets and flood zones. But my reporting, and Bailey’s analysis, suggests there’s something else going on too. Bin complaints, we found, vary significantly depending on who, and what, is picking up the trash. And in my neighbourhood that comes down to a private company called Green For Life Environmental (GFL).

Photos of damaged recycling bins taken in the Toronto neighbourhoods a Star analysis shows have the most per capita bin complaints in the city. Richard Warnica. Dec. 2, 2021.

On a recent Thursday morning, on a quiet street a few blocks south of Eglinton Avenue West near Oakwood Avenue, a large, electric-green truck pulled up to the sidewalk near a small park. A young man hopped out of the cab. He wore a neon green hooded jacket. Moving with practised speed, he grabbed a blue curbside recycling bin by the handle, flipped the lid open and half-pulled, half-swung the back into position between a set of three metal claws on the back of the truck.

As the claw’s fist closed around the bin, you could it see it squeeze the corners of the lid. The tips of the claws, meanwhile, dug into the body of the bin, straining the hard plastic as it shook up and down, tumbling paper, plastic and other packaging out into the truck. With a lever’s pull, the operator lowered the bin back to the ground. As the claw’s pressure eased, a wide fracture became visible along the side of the bin. The cut split the container from the lip, diagonally down to the tip of the white logo stencilled on the blue plastic: the two curved towers of Toronto City Hall.

In May 2011, Toronto city council, under Mayor Rob Ford, voted to contract out curbside waste collection in one quarter of the city, from Yonge Street west to the Humber River. (Garbage collection on the other side of the river, in Etobicoke, was privatized in 1995.) City council awarded the initial contract in what is known as District Two, where I live, to GFL, which was, at the time, a bit player in the waste collection industry.

The Toronto deal was a watershed moment for Vaughan-based GFL. The company used it as a springboard for breakneck growth. Today, GFL bills itself as the fourth-largest waste management company in North America. It has a market cap of almost $14 billion. Founder and CEO Patrick Dovigi, a former Edmonton Oilers draft pick, is the closest thing there is to a celebrity in the Canadian garbage industry. He was a billionaire by the time he was 38 years old, according to Canadian Business magazine. In 2020, he was Canada’s highest paid CEO, according to a ranking compiled by the Globe and Mail.

Photos of damaged recycling bins taken in the Toronto neighbourhoods a Star analysis shows have the most per capita bin complaints in the city. Richard Warnica. Dec. 2, 2021.

But the ride hasn’t always been smooth for GFL and Dovigi. In the early days of the Toronto contract, resident complaints about late and missed pickups were common, and the new green GFL trucks were accused by one city councillor of leaking “garbage juice” all over the city. In 2014, the province downgraded GFL’s safety rating, largely because of issues with the drivers and trucks that arose in the early, rocky months of the Toronto contract. (The company’s rating was restored to “satisfactory” a year later.)

Dovigi’s strategy of growth through acquisition has also raised eyebrows. In 2020, shortsellers Spruce Point Capital called GFL “an aggressive roll-up … that overpays for assets” and has shares that “could be worthless absent new funding.” (GFL called those allegations “deeply flawed” and self-serving.) More recently, Dovigi and GFL have been involved in a sometimes-heated conflict with other companies, inside and outside the waste industry, over the role GFL hopes to play in the new provincial curbside recycling regime. (Dovigi downplayed that dispute in an earlier interview with The Star.)

For residents of Toronto, too, it has been a bumpy path. Private waste collection hasn’t quite been the savings windfall it was made out to be. In November, the Star’s David Rider reported that collection east of Yonge Street, where city workers do the pickups, is cheaper now per household than it is on the west side, where GFL and another private company, Miller Waste Systems, operate. And while Ford, and his successor, John Tory, had both hoped to privatize collection citywide, for now, and likely the foreseeable future, the east/west, public/private divide remains.

When I moved from Riverdale to Oakwood-Vaughan last summer I was moving from an area serviced by city workers to one under contract to GFL. The difference, as a resident, was both impossible to miss and easy to ignore.

Photos of damaged recycling bins taken in the Toronto neighbourhoods a Star analysis shows have the most per capita bin complaints in the city. Richard Warnica. Dec. 2, 2021.

The service was functionally the same. You put out your bins, they empty them. In seven months here, GFL has never missed a pickup. The bin equipment isn’t any different, either. The city provides the same Rehrig Pacific-brand garbage, compost and recycling bins to every household in Toronto.

But the contrast in visible damage is significant.

According to Bailey’s analysis, my old FSA, in Riverdale, had 21.7 bin complaints per 1,000 occupied dwellings last year. In my new neighbourhood, there were 52.03. That’s no one-year anomaly. And the difference isn’t just visible on the postal code level.

GFL has been collecting curbside waste in District Two since August 2012. (Next year, it will take over collection in Etobicoke, District Four, as well.) In seven of the 10 years since, the number of bin complaints per 1,000 occupied dwellings in District Two has been higher than the city average. It’s been the highest in the city for the last six years in a row.

That means that if you live between Yonge Street and the Humber River -- if GFL picks up your trash, in other words -- you are statistically, significantly more likely to complain about a damaged or broken bin than you would be if you lived in any other part of Toronto.

Does that mean that GFL is responsible for breaking those bins? That’s a more complicated question. The city seems reluctant to draw that conclusion.

“For the most part, they do an amazing job as a contractor,” said Lisa Duncan, Toronto’s director of collection and litter operations. Instead, Duncan believes it’s mostly the topography of the neighbourhood that’s to blame. “That particular geographic area has some real specific challenges.”

The steep and narrow streets between Eglinton Avenue West and St. Clair Avenue West have a tendency to turn into wind tunnels on blustery days, Duncan points out. The city also believes more bins are stored outside in District Two than in any other part of the city, exposing them to weather damage, animals and more. In the Rockcliffe-Smythe area just west of the damage epicentre, flooding can be a significant issue. And in the winter, bins can end up atop large snow piles, waiting for pickup. “And then the plow comes by and the bins go flying,” Duncan said.

It’s difficult to evaluate all those explanations statistically. The city doesn’t keep specific data on things like bin storage or wind damage. But anecdotally, I haven’t noticed any more bins outside in Oakwood-Vaughan than I did in Riverdale, and definitely not in Rockcliffe-Smythe, which is one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the city. I also didn’t see a single bin on a snowbank after the massive storms in January, and I looked for them, hard.

But in any case, all of those issues are secondary, according to Duncan. From her perspective, the most significant bin problem in District Two isn’t animals, weather or snow: it’s the trucks.

Photos of damaged recycling bins taken in the Toronto neighbourhoods a Star analysis shows have the most per capita bin complaints in the city. Richard Warnica. Dec. 2, 2021.

About a year ago, Calloway Scott put her recycling bin out in front of her home near Oakwood Village on collection day. By the time she picked it up that afternoon the right side of the bin was cracked open from the lip almost down to the wheels. “What happened?” I asked her. “The claw broke it,” she replied.

The city and its contractors use two different kinds of trucks to pick up waste in Toronto. One, the one used in my old neighbourhood, is fully automatic. It has a mechanism on the side of the truck that can grasp a bin, tip it over and place it back down automatically, minimizing wear and tear on both the operator and the bin.

But the fully automatic trucks aren’t great for every kind of street. Steep hills, tight lanes and sharp bends make it hard for the large, cumbersome trucks to get around. So on the more finicky streets in most of District Two GFL employs what are known as split packers.

Split packers have two chambers, like Parliament: one for garbage or recycling (depending on the day) and one for compost. They allow operators to pick up two kinds of waste, from both sides of the street, all at once. But split packers, unlike fully automated trucks, also require a lot of human intervention. And that’s where the problems come in.

With a split packer, the operator has to take the garbage or recycling bins off the sidewalk and place them either inside a three-fingered claw mechanism at the back of the truck or onto a tipping plate. The claw then closes on the bin, tips it up and dumps out the contents inside the hopper (the big crushing chamber inside the truck.) If there’s material stuck inside a bin, the operator can shake it up and down using a lever on the side of the truck, banging it until everything falls loose.

Eighty per cent of all District Two streets are serviced by semi-automated split packers. The rest of the city, minus a few streets in District Three which stretches from Yonge Street east to Scarborough, is fully automated. As far as the city is concerned, that’s the answer right there -- semi-automated split-packers are harder on bins than automatic trucks. District Two has more split packers than any other part of the city, so it makes sense that District Two would have the most broken bins.

“It’s just a lot more handling of the bin,” Duncan said. “There’s a lot more involved.”

Photos of damaged recycling bins taken in the Toronto neighbourhoods a Star analysis shows have the most per capita bin complaints in the city. Richard Warnica. Dec. 2, 2021.

But there are some issues with that theory. For one thing, bin complaints in the chunk of District Three, south of Gerrard Street, where the city does use split packer trucks, have never been particularly high, and they certainly haven’t been significantly higher over time than those in the rest of the district, where automatic trucks are in use.

It also ignores another key variable: the drivers. According to the city, there’s a highly specific way the bins are supposed to fit into the claw or onto the tipper to minimize damage. But in several days of walking and driving around District Two, following GFL split packer trucks, I rarely saw operators following those rules to a T.

In theory, operators are supposed to place the bins, lid closed, facing forward against the back of the truck. Once the bin is secured, the mechanism can tip it up and shake it if necessary to get all the contents out before placing back it back on the street.

I watched hundreds of bins being emptied by GFL employees for this story. I rarely saw that happen. Instead, I saw what you’d probably expect to see from busy operators trying to pick up, unload and return countless bins every day.

I saw bins going in with the lid facing every direction. I saw lids swung open onto the claw and pinched inside its gripping fingers. I saw operators emptying overflowing bins, which technically they’re not supposed to do. (“Overfilling can cause the bin to break or slip from the locking mechanism,” according to the city.) I saw bins getting scraped up, knocked down, emptied by hand and tossed back onto the road. In several cases, I saw the claw press into the body of an improperly loaded bin, straining and sometimes cracking the plastic.

After I followed multiple trucks with different operators on different days in different parts of the district, it wasn’t much of a mystery anymore. I can’t say that GFL operators caused all the damage I saw -- the punched in lids, squeezed edges and cracked bodies -- but the evidence is pretty compelling they were responsible for a significant part of it. Watch a GFL split packer on garbage day and you can see it for yourself. The operators, and the trucks, really are beating those bins to hell.

GFL’s Dovigi declined to answer any questions for this story. “Th(anks) Richard but for that you will have to deal with the city,” he wrote in an email. And the city, for its part, is clear that it doesn’t blame GFL. “If you’re picking up a bin every single week, week after week, 52 times (a year) … you’re going to have issues, there’s no doubt,” Duncan said.

But this isn’t just about ugly cracks or frustrated residents. There’s a real cost here, too. In 2017, Toronto signed a 10-year, $48 million maintenance and replacement contract with Rehrig for garbage and recycling bins. Every time a bin gets repaired or a new one sent out, the city pays Rehrig out of that fund, no matter where the broken bins came from or who caused the damage.

So if GFL is not responsible for all those broken bins I see walking around my neighbourhood, then who is? Duncan, for her part, has one idea. “The reality is, it sounds like residents aren’t calling in repairs,” she said. “They just leave them there broken, when we would be more than happy to send a replacement.”

It’s you, in other words, not the city, or the private company we pay to pick up our trash.

Photos of damaged recycling bins taken in the Toronto neighbourhoods a Star analysis shows have the most per capita bin complaints in the city. Richard Warnica. Dec. 2, 2021.

BY THE NUMBERS

The City of Toronto recorded a total of 43,512 complaints related to broken or damaged garbage, recycling and compost bins in 2021. Almost half of those complaints, more than 20,000 of them, came from just one of the city’s four pickup districts, District Two, the area between the Humber River and Yonge St., where GFL has been in charge of pickups since 2012.

That means District Two was by far the city’s worst area for bin complaints last year. District Three, from Yonge St. east Scarborough, an area served by city workers, was in second place with fewer than 10,000 complaints.

Those raw numbers make the disparity seem worse than it is. But even if you correct for the number of occupied dwellings per district, District Two, under GFL, is still way out in front. Last year, District Two had 49.7 complaints per thousand occupied dwellings, according to the 311 complaint data. The next closest area was District Four (Scarborough) with less than 35.6 complaints. The city average was 39.1.

That gap has also grown worse over time. In 2011, the last full year before GFL took over, District Two recorded just 13.8 complaints per 1000 occupied dwellings, only slightly above the city average that year of 13.3.