City bureaucrats are scared to death of garbage. So they've decided to stalk Montrealers over every last scrap they put on the curb
by PHILIP PREVILLE Photo by Jason Felker Sidebar: Top ten trash crimes "Have you seen some of the places in the city where the trash piles up?" the city of Montreal garbage inspector says when asked about the city's new garbage regulations. "There are areas with a serious filth problem. People have to do their part to keep the city clean." He refuses to give his name, and he says these things pleadingly, as though desperately seeking sympathy. Obviously he can see what's coming, and he knows his future looks grim. As a garbage inspector, it's his job to roam the streets looking for aberrant trash bags, poke through their contents, find an envelope or something else that identifies the bag's owner and write the tickets. And he's about to get a lot busier: on Tuesday, the city announced that he and his 16 colleagues will begin handing out "courtesy warnings" for people who continue to place white plastic grocery bags at the curb for trash collection.
Then, around mid-November, the warnings will stop and he and his colleagues will start issuing real tickets. And they'll issue lots of them: next year, the city plans to hire 18 more trash cops. City hall says the trash police will be "self-financing," which, according to opposition city councillor Marvin Rotrand, basically means they'll have to issue around $865,000 in fines next year. Oh yes, the garbage inspector knows what's coming: he and his colleagues are about to join the ranks of the language cops and the green onions. Soon, they will be the most hated public employees in Montreal. According to Rotrand, they will suffer needlessly. "Montreal does not have a garbage problem," he says. "They're simply forcing Montrealers to use big suburban-style garbage bags and bins, even though it's totally impractical."
A brief history of Provigo bags The story of Montreal's new garbage law is essentially a story of civil servant terror, of bureaucrats scared senseless over changes they can't control. When the white plastic grocery bag became widespread about 15 years ago, it gave rise to a spontaneous and remarkable urban innovation: people everywhere started "recycling" them, i.e. using them as garbage bags. Entrepreneurs caught on fast, creating garbage cans and door-mounted wire contraptions designed specifically to hold the grocery bag. And people no longer had to spend money on big green bags. But those in charge of urban cleanliness saw things differently. The way city bureaucrats tell the story, all of a sudden everyone was dropping three or four little white bags on the curb, all piled up willy-nilly, instead of one nice big neat one. Because they were small, they claim, people simply dropped them on the curb any day of the week. And they were slightly translucent: you could see people's coffee grinds, rolled kleenexes, meat scraps and banana peels pushing at the outer edge of the bag, almost pulsating with vermin. In other words, instead of seeing a positive urban invention, they saw a citizenry that had become unkempt and whose filth was spilling out onto city streets all at once. "People started using their grocery bags for their trash, and we chose to tolerate that behaviour," says Christiane Bolduc of the city's public works department, treating Montrealers like errant schoolchildren. "Now we have decided we cannot tolerate that behaviour anymore, and suddenly people think it's their God given right to use grocery bags for their trash. Unfortunately, that's simply not the case." Originally, the city intended to outlaw everything except large garbage bags, but this week they relented somewhat: they will now allow smaller store-bought bags, of any coulour, 56 centimetres by 61 centimetres in size. But grocery bags, due to their status as public-filth enemy number one, remain illegal. Technically, you can still use grocery bags for your trash; but before you put it out on the curb, you have to put them inside a bigger bag. Public works spokesman Jacques Tremblay readily admits that the new regulations are a bureaucratic initiative, not a political one. He also confesses that the new regulations are not the result of any comprehensive studies conducted by the public works department; rather, employees simply decided there was a cleanliness problem and set out to fix it.
Throwing money away But while city employees like to portray the new regulations as a defense against trash anarchy, there is also another, less altruistic reason to them: money. And it goes deeper than just issuing fines --they believe the new regulations will help them cut costs. "The city now ships most of its garbage to off-island landfills, and pays landfill owners on a per-ton basis," says Tremblay. "That's why it's now an offense to put recyclable material into the trash. Landfilling newspapers and tin cans costs money." Meanwhile, explains Tremblay, the city pays another private company, Rebuts Solides Canadiens, to manage all the city's recycling. "We pay them to handle 50,000 tons of recycled material each year," explains Tremblay. "Even if we don't deliver 50,000 tons to them, that's the minimum we pay for. Thus far, we've never delivered more than 40,000 tons." But, says Tremblay, that's about to change. In the past those grocery bags weren't recyclable, but now they are. "We have been working closely with a Montreal company that turns grocery bags into hard plastic crates and platforms for forklifts," he says. "It's a recycling breakthrough." Perhaps it is. But it also explains why the city is forcing its citizens to fork out money on Glad garbage bags: they want those grocery bags in the recycling bin, to help them meet their 50,000-ton quota. Adds Tremblay: "If we deliver more than 50,000 tons of recyclables, the city gets rebates! It's written into the contract!"
Trash-magnet streetcorners And so, faced with both budget and cleanliness problems, city officials decided to get tough. Fines will range from $50 for a first offense to $1,000 for repeat offenders. But will more cops and bigger fines make Montreal's streets clean? Rotrand says it won't. "About 90 per cent of Montreal streets are clean," he says. "The only problem is that there are certain parts of the city--specific, easily identifiable streetcorners--that are basically garbage magnets. And the way to solve those problems is to work with the local population, not start handing out tickets to everyone across the city." Georges Delorme and his wife, Jeannette, agree. Their home is located near one of those garbage magnets, beside an alleyway in the heart of the Plateau. On the other side of the alley, outside their living room window, is an abandoned building. They say people in neighbouring apartment buildings love to pile their little grocery bags of trash there, often just leaning over their third-storey balcony and tossing them down. "They don't care what day of the week it is," says Delorme. "By the time garbage day comes around, it's a mountain of trash." Delorme has been complaining to city officials about the problem for 10 years. And for 10 years, inspectors have been handing out tickets to the apartment-dwellers for putting their garbage out on the wrong day (a decades-old offense). It's come to nothing. "The only way to solve the problem is to make it impossible for people to put their garbage there," says Delorme. "Maybe the city should plant bushes in the alley beside that building. "We're in favour of fines and enforcement. But the renters in the apartment complexes don't stay very long, and neither do the janitors. Ultimately, fines alone can't solve the problem." And so the best Georges Delorme can expect from the new regulations is that, instead of a pile of small white garbage bags in his living room window, he'll see a mountain of big green garbage bags. Sidebar: Top ten trash crimes |
He'll also hand out warnings for many other newly created offenses, including: placing tin cans or other recyclable materials in the trash instead of the recycling bin; failure to sort and separate your recyclables; and leaving your empty recycling bin on the curb past 7 p.m.