Committee explores making space for new bins
"Go anywhere in the city, and what do you see everywhere? Bins," said Milczyn at Wednesday's Planning and Growth Management meeting. "Bins, bins bins. And we don't have any place to put them. Whether the house is 100 years old or just five years old, it wasn't ever contemplated that you'd have to provide solid waste facilities for the City of Toronto."
Milczyn persuaded the committee to ask planning staff to draft a new zoning bylaw that would require new homes to provide some sort of enclosed space adequate to store the new bins, which will be in every home in the city by the end of 2009.
The bins are an integral part of Toronto's new pay-as-you-throw garbage collection system. Homeowners are provided with green bins for organic waste and blue bins for recycling waste at no charge. But the garbage bin comes at a price, depending on how big it is.
And both the garbage bins and the recycling bins can be quite large. Milczyn said the recycling bins, which are beginning to roll out in his ward, are also unsightly, but many people find they have no choice but to put them outside.
"I've got one in my driveway, but I have someplace to store it - a double garage. But what about neighbours who actually keep their cars in the garage?" said Milczyn, who didn't support the decision to make use of the bins when it came to Toronto Council last year.
Now, he said the city should do what it can to make it work - and while that amounts to not much for existing homes, a zoning bylaw would force home-builders constructing new homes to create some sort of accommodation for the storage of the new bins.
The bylaw would only apply to new construction.
"Maybe we could require people to retroactively provide something that encloses the bins on their property - but then they're going to have some kind of shack attached to the front of their house to store their garbage bin? It's not going to be any better," said Milczyn.
Reports on a new bylaw will come forward in the fall. In the meantime, city planning staff told the committee they could work with builders in the site-plan stage of planning, to ensure that new structures had some space set aside for the bins.
