Thursday, January 26, 2006
TTC Recycles?
One thing that has flabbergasted be over the past year with regards to the TTC is their "recycling plan".
Courtesy of papers such as the Metro, Dose, 24 Hours, and the more conventional National Post/Globe And Mail, the TTC is probably home to 10% of all paper use in the city of toronto in the average day. You'd think they would have developed an innovative recycling strategy for dealing with this mammoth influx of paper.
They used to have these big blue metal bins with a small slot at the top for you to feed your newspapers into. They were easy to identify, and well positioned. You could quickly and painlessly dump off your paper, and be confident it would be recycled - because of the unique appearance of the bins, and because of the slot at the top only true dufuses would be depositing garbage into these things.
However, at some point in the past year they've moved to what presumably was supposed to be a "better" plan for recycling. The blue bins were removed and replaced with three side-by-side open top garbage 'cans'. This allows for trash, paper and cans/glass...GREAT! Except, the cans aren't super clearly labelled(people will only spend a fraction of a second on identifying which bin to use), and there's no means of physical differentiation (they all have the same large round open top).
As a result, the paper goes in the garbage. the garbage goes in the paper. the cans go in em all. And at the end of the day you end up with three cans of garbage - there's no way that ttc employees go through the bags to properly seperate things, and there's no way that the recycling company can make due with so much garbage in the recycling.
To make things worse, all three are essentially a round metal hoop with a clear garbage bag attached to the hoop. As the bags fill up, they inevitably fall off the hoop, and garbage is strewn all over the floor.
Who the heck decided these things were a good idea!? Why haven't they bitten the bullet and abandoned them in favour of a better design!?
What do other cities like Montreal do to address the issue of recycling?
Courtesy of papers such as the Metro, Dose, 24 Hours, and the more conventional National Post/Globe And Mail, the TTC is probably home to 10% of all paper use in the city of toronto in the average day. You'd think they would have developed an innovative recycling strategy for dealing with this mammoth influx of paper.
They used to have these big blue metal bins with a small slot at the top for you to feed your newspapers into. They were easy to identify, and well positioned. You could quickly and painlessly dump off your paper, and be confident it would be recycled - because of the unique appearance of the bins, and because of the slot at the top only true dufuses would be depositing garbage into these things.
However, at some point in the past year they've moved to what presumably was supposed to be a "better" plan for recycling. The blue bins were removed and replaced with three side-by-side open top garbage 'cans'. This allows for trash, paper and cans/glass...GREAT! Except, the cans aren't super clearly labelled(people will only spend a fraction of a second on identifying which bin to use), and there's no means of physical differentiation (they all have the same large round open top).
As a result, the paper goes in the garbage. the garbage goes in the paper. the cans go in em all. And at the end of the day you end up with three cans of garbage - there's no way that ttc employees go through the bags to properly seperate things, and there's no way that the recycling company can make due with so much garbage in the recycling.
To make things worse, all three are essentially a round metal hoop with a clear garbage bag attached to the hoop. As the bags fill up, they inevitably fall off the hoop, and garbage is strewn all over the floor.
Who the heck decided these things were a good idea!? Why haven't they bitten the bullet and abandoned them in favour of a better design!?
What do other cities like Montreal do to address the issue of recycling?
# posted by Greg @ 6:17 AM 
Comments:
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i think the mayor rode the subway one day and was appalled at all the paper strewn about, so he installed paper recycling stations at the stations. They're green, look like the garbage containers for papertowels in the bathroom. I'm not sure how much other crap gets in though.
# posted by 
: 7:20 PM
: 7:20 PM
The U-Bahn in Berlin has a great system. I was so impress I took a picture.
http://mikekelland.com/gallery/album06/100_4334
http://mikekelland.com/gallery/album06/100_4334
# posted by : 9:26 PM
: 9:26 PM
don't the blue bags identify them as recycling bags, as opposed to the clear garbage bags? i think they got rid of the closed top bins and garbage cans because of the bombings in london.
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# posted by : 9:06 AM
: 9:06 AM << Home
