Behemoth bins changing the 'hood
Apr 18, 2008 04:30 AM
Antonia Zerbisias TheStar.com
It was a windy Wednesday this week when my neighbours and I wheeled our monster recycling bins for the first time to, well, wherever we could squeeze them on the sidewalk.
In the olden days, a few gusts hitting our old overflowing blue boxes and haphazard piles of newspapers, pizza boxes and junk mail would leave the road covered in litter.
You can always hear those egg cartons clattering along the street on a day like this.
Recycling day is always a mess, even when there is no breeze.
But not so much this week.
Sure, we're all complaining about the monster bins.
I ordered up the largest size, big enough to hold all the bodies of the city politicians and bureaucrats who thought they'd be a boon to old Toronto neighbourhoods. That's because I subscribe to three dailies and fanatically shred everything with my name and/or address on it.
I used to recycle a lot of water bottles but I gave up buying them a couple of years ago. All that extra plastic suddenly struck me as supremely Earth-hostile and I was getting concerned about chemicals leeching into the water.
Now the only time I buy water is at the movies because I have yet to find a popcorn stand where they'll just pour you some water into a paper cup or a bottle you tucked in your purse.
Now I am tossing that bottle because it contains Bisphenol-A (BPA).
Anyway, we all managed to inaugurate our new dumpsters with relatively little trouble, although most of us were wondering about December.
We had no sidewalks all last winter. Come next blizzard, what little space there is for pedestrians between the snowbanks and the parked cars would be occupied by these hulks.
The good news is, on Wednesday, there was almost no Styrofoam flotsam, no polystyrene jetsam crushed along the curb.
Oh sure, some people rebelled and used their old blue or grey boxes. Others simply didn't have room for everything in the default-sized medium bins. This meant, of course, that the charming children of Earl Grey School up the street would find the excess, as usual, and take out their preteen hostility on it by drop-kicking stray cans and milk cartons at each other.
But all in all – and please don't kill me for saying this – recycling day was all right.
Except for one thing.
Her.
I don't know her name. I only know that she always comes around mid-morning, after we've hauled our stuff to the street and before the trucks have passed.
She always has what strikes me as a furtive and embarrassed look as she paws through the bins picking out the booze bottles, good for nickels and dimes when she returns them to the Beer Store.
We Riverdalers can't be bothered, I guess.
Middle-aged and neatly groomed, she can't be doing this for fun, scavenging through our peanut butter jars, looking for empty bottles of pinot grigio at 20 cents a pop.
That's why I always made a point of leaving my empties at the top of my recyclables, separate, where she could easily find them.
But now it's different.
With this new system, everything is a jumble. And the bins are deep. Most of their contents will always be more than an arm's length away. If she were to reach down, the damn things could topple.
She doesn't look as if she could handle that. Which could explain why her bundle buggy seemed emptier than usual on Wednesday.
Maybe there really was something left in the bins' wake after all.
Human debris, blown off by the winds of change.
Antonia Zerbisias is a Living section columnist. azerbisias@thestar.ca. She blogs at thestar.blogs.com.
