|
Talking trash >> There are over 3,400 public receptacles for anything ragged or rotten or rusty--as long as it's not stuffed in a plastic grocery bag
by PHILIP PREVILLE Photos by Jason Felker Montrealers are up in arms over city hall's plan to outlaw the use of plastic grocery bags as garbage bags. What good reason could the city possibly have for being so uptight about garbage? City officials say one main reason is the overflowing of the public trash cans, located in parks and on streetcorners throughout Montreal.
Final factoid: The tulips cost $500 apiece. According to city trash spokesperson Jacques Tremblay, the tulips have solved a refuse problem but created a budget problem: if the city needs one extra garbage can, the cost is too high to take the money out of petty cash, but not high enough to qualify as a major expense. The city solved the problem by ordering 350 of them in 1999, at a total cost of $175,000.
|
There are 2,700 of these (wooden) garbage cans, an older model with an 18-inch opening, dating back to the Drapeau era. Whereas residential garbage collection occurs twice a week, these receptacles are emptied every day. Mischievously minded people who live near these public trash cans are nefariously using the collection schedule to their advantage. Why keep a small grocery bag filled with rotting, vermin-infested garbage inside your apartment, stinking up your kitchen until garbage day, when you can just plop it in the receptacle across the street at any time? But when these cans fill up too fast, say city officials, passers-by throw their candy wrappers, apple cores and banana peels on the sidewalk, creating all manner of pedestrian hazards.
So, three years ago, city engineers actually designed this model themselves, which they flatteringly call the "tulip." There are about 700 trash tulips in the city. The tulip's big improvement, aside from its ornamental qualities: a cover with an eight-inch hole in the middle, just big enough to accept the detritus from a McDonald's take-out trio, but too small to stuff a Provigo bag full of residential refuse--thus foiling the city's scourge of trash-collection subversives.