Litter often gets no respect. How encouraging it was to see Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson bring littering to the forefront in his state of the city address last week. Contrast this to Toronto’s mayor --  you know, the guy observed by police to have littered a public park with juice cartons and a liquor bottle, the guy soon to be known as the mayor formerly known as Rob Ford.

Jim Watson, who ushered in an interesting bin experiment on central Elgin Street this year, expresses fatigue over the sight of litter and poor recycling habits. (The two are interlinked.)  In his speech he called on compatriots to improve their recycling practices and pledged more bins and innovation to reduce the rate of littering.

Watson, in my view, proves that no mayor who litters should be mayor.  Real leadership starts with who we are at the core.  A person with littering at his core travels an anti-social path of behaviours that could escalate, according to experts who study anti-social crimes and make a link between littering and other forms of deviance.

Two high profile cases of late – one being Mr. Ford’s, and the other, the metamorphosis of Justin Bieber, who has grown from spewing his spit mucous over an upscale Toronto hotel balcony earlier this year to egging houses, public street racing and impairment in the past few months.

For Ford, on the other hand, his “gateway crime” of littering is an indicator of his love of underbelly associations with fellow crack cocaine users and dealers and his unyielding passion for alcoholic beverages, including whilst driving.

If you litter your city, you can’t be the face for clean-ups.  You don’t belong in the staged photo-ops, where you put down your work gloves as soon as the cameras leave.  You can’t speak intelligently about littering because, clearly, you don’t get it if you are wanton with your discarded waste.  You can’t be trusted as a lawmaker. 

Littering is the lowest rung on a long ladder of criminality.  Ottawa’s Jim Watson understands this and will focus his attention on it, he says.  By contrast, Ford stumbles along blindly, carelessly littering beautiful Toronto as he goes, stupefied.

We’re licked, Canada, and I’m ticked. 

Canada Post’s shocker decision to stamp itself out of door-to-door mail delivery within five years seems, as they say, ‘signed, sealed and delivered’ with last week's official announcement.

In future “customers” will trek to the nearest wall of outdoor urban mailboxes to collect their mail.  Unfortunately this is also where some residents sort their correspondence by dropping that which they don’t want on the ground.

Litter becomes the residual issue of Canada Post’s cringing move to be the first G7 nation to stop delivering mail to our doors.

The crown corporation without a doubt will be adding to our national litter problem. But who controls Canada Post? 

It’s time for a bright light to emerge with a way to regulate the Canadian postal corporation’s littered junk mail as the transition is made to replace postal walks with an ugly box.

Canada Post ought to install a blue bin for fine paper at every urban mailbox location and contribute to the collection and cleanup costs.  Municipalities ought to be thinking about the mechanism for enforcing this requirement.  In new housing developments where developers pay for the mailbox installations they should also pay for bins and recycling of waste mail.

I find Canada Post management to be one of the least responsive of any public corporation I have encountered over years of litter research. 

Left to its own devices it will surely walk away from its litter problems just as it is bolting from home mail delivery.  Incredibly, Canada Post Corporation and its federal helpmates have found yet another way to stick it to the public.

I have an open and shut case against Toronto Mayor Rob Ford that no one else is talking about.  It has nothing to do with crack, drug dealers, extortion, the lies, the cheating – I’m not talking about any of those offences. 

I found out all about Rob Ford in 2004 when I took a complaint to the city’s integrity commissioner about Ford, the then renegade councillor and resident council outcast, distinguishing myself as the first Torontonian to do so successfully.  I’ve watched Ford like an eagle scout ever since.

Toronto, I believe we have caught him cold committing a crime. Forget the video. Forget the chief of police. Forget the mayor’s criminal friend Mr. Lisi.  Erase all that, and you still have the surveillance notes and photos.  Within those notes contains the irrefutable record of wrongdoing.  An easy guilty plea, iron clad.  I’m quoting here from The Toronto Star:

“Police then followed Lisi to what the documents refer to as Weston Wood Park, now called Douglas Ford Park in honour of the mayor’s entrepreneur/politician father. Ford arrived at the park in his Escalade a few minutes later, after which the pair “met and made their way into a secluded area of the adjacent woods where they were obscured from surveillance efforts and stayed for approximately one hour,” according to the documents.  The two men emerged from the woods and drove away in their own cars. Police then went into the woods and located the area in the park where Lisi and Ford met, where they found a vodka bottle and a juice bottle, which they seized.”

So there you have it.  The Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, littered!  In a city park, no less! In Toronto the fine for littering is $365.  (Earlier in the stakeout the police had observed Ford using a street bin for other bottles and a bag of fast food waste.)

That the mayor has littered would fascinate green criminologists like UK Professor Nic Groombridge.  He would tell you that people who litter signal their potential to harbor deeper anti-social problems that can lead them further into crime.  In fact, Groombridge has determined that littering is the “gateway crime” just as marijuana has been described as the gateway drug on the road to, say, crack cocaine use.

From littering also comes graffiti, spitting, vandalism, decreasing property values and added costs to the taxpayer.  Littering often occurs away from public view.

So when I hear the mayor of Toronto sweating out an apology for us all in the sterility of a midtown radio station, I’d like him to own up and pay up on the littering part of this whole mess at least.  People who love clean cities need role models with the capacity to understand why setting an example is important, why not littering is important.

Then there’s the matter of his pissing in a public park ...

Let’s not go there.

If you want to know how Toronto is doing, talk to a person who cleans the city's transit cars.  
I struck up a conversation with one of them recently. I didn’t get her name.

The Toronto Transit Commission has taken a more aggressive push back at litter in recent years. Personnel sweep clean each car at the beginning and end of each run.

Now that the transit authority cleans up more, people are messier than before, the maintenance worker tells me. Hmmm. Maybe the TTC publicized this policy change a little too well.  Riders are aware of the authority's new attention to tidiness and are confident that litter left behind will be tended to at the end of the line.

That littering increases in the presence of avid cleanup practices is explained in a national Singapore study from 2011.  Researchers found that littering increases where there are anti-littering signs and officials visible, a paradox.

My newfound contact says some customers assist and are appreciative.  But others stand in the way of their messes being tidied and block her path. Men are the worst offenders, I am told.

Time to set up a new kind of support group. 

Imagine $30 million a year going into a litter prevention campaign in Ontario.  Pie in the sky? Not if Canada’s beverage industry has anything to say about it. And it turns out industry has quite a lot to say, committing to seize more of its product packaging out of the hands of litterbugs and the jaws of landfill sites. The Canadian Beverage Container Recycling Association (CBCRA) is out to reclaim its used drink cans, bottles and boxes and is ready to put up to 30 million bucks annually into promoting avid recycling away from home.

The people of Ontario are being challenged to accept that they need to do a much better job of placing beverage containers in bins where they can be recaptured, resold and reused.  It’s the perfect circle. The only knot in the flow is the human reluctance to consider alternatives to littering when faced with the inconvenience of having to hold on to an empty container for more than a few moments.  So the beverage industry wants to pay to put bins everywhere and build a whole new wave of green businesses in the process.  It might cost a penny or so more at the register for your beverage of choice. In Manitoba the container recycling fee (CRF) is two cents.

Promotion and education figure prominently in the plan being advanced by CBCRA at Waste Diversion Ontario, the agency responsible for approving industry plans for waste management stewardship and sustainability.  If you missed the first WDO webinar from CBCRA, it will be repeated on Nov 7 from 1:30 to 3:30.  www.vvctv.ca/wdo/20131107/  Password: wdo1

Well worth it to tune in for a good two-way exchange on a plan that will send your beverage containers into the recycling stream instead of having them languish on the ground, beach or road looking ugly.   

CBCRA has stepped forward with a bold vision for diverting 75 per cent of its containers from landfill five years in.  Let your imagination fly once again to the possibility of three-quarter fewer beverage bottles being lifted from litter’s potentially endless stream.

Generally, people commenting via the Oct 28 webinar, www.vvctv.ca/wdo/20131028/ had questions about holding industry to its promise, accountability, the calculation and management of the CRF, contamination (i.e. human error), impact on municipalities and the residential blue box program, and, of course, I raised litter.

On all these categories – plus, plus, plus marks for industry.  The hints of criticism I heard from webinar comment quarters yesterday were muted to say the least.

CBCRA has the right idea and has my unqualified support. Does it have yours?

Manitoba’s already doing it. Help bring Recycle Everywhere to Ontario. Contact [email protected] to voice support. Or phone Mary Cummins at at [email protected], or 416-226-5113, ext. 232

We first featured Susan Coolen in Litterland #14.  A former resident of Montreal and her native Nova Scotia, Susan came to Kitchener and landed the coveted artist-in-residence position, an annual program that Kitchener was the first in Canada to establish.

(Pictured left, Susan shows us her collection in Kitchener, Ontario.)
 


You have the rest of October to see Susan Coolen’s eye-opening LITTER-ARTI exhibit in Kitchener, Ontario. 

Tucked away in an alcove on the ground floor of the King Street city hall edifice, across from the revenue department, a trove of trash turned treasures awaits.

Coolen is a scavenger artist, who not only creates works of art from litter, but  painstakingly sorts and catalogues all that she collects, identifying 50 different categories of litter for all to see.

Wall murals, chewing gum collages, sculpture, portfolios of photography and documentation of one artist’s fascinating voyage along life’s littered trail exposes all manner of tossed trash, abundant ear plugs being one of her most surprising finds.

Outside the gallery space, tree protection fences in the city’s amiable centre town bear the markings of Coolen’s creation.  Hubcaps, lighters, plastic utensils and PET bottles are transformed with nothing more than Coolen’s hand, some lights, glue and store-bought twist ties.   The art is not vandalized, although passersby frequently will help themselves to a lighter if it works, and Coolen fills in the gaps with replacements from her collection of found lighters on the day of my visit.

Trash to art projects have been launched to draw attention to littering, but I had to confess to Susan I have mixed feelings about them. Yes, I’m all for the reclamation, the re-use, the “nothing is wasted” framework that is the foundation for this art. 

But is it possible that trash art gives the common litterer another excuse to throw garbage on the ground?  This time the excuse would be “I’m doing something useful by providing art materials for trash artists.”

Susan laughs when I pose the question.

“The odd person would have that mindset but they would likely drop that litter anyway,” she said.

The whole point of her yearlong project has been to raise awareness and create an attitude shift, she explains.

“Everyone has been educated about litter,“ she says.

Our little stroll downtown convinces me that LITTER-ARTI has made a difference. The downtown is clean, not perfect but, Susan tells me, cleaner than before. Her funky sidewalk art pieces aren’t falling prey to vandals.  In Toronto they can’t even install ashtrays on the main street without half of them needing repair within the first three months. 

Coolen’s exhibit has fostered media buzz and civic pride while elevating litter up off the sidewalk and into the gallery of the Berlin Tower artspace. 

“People do what they can get away with and if they know someone is watching and making note of it and don’t approve of it I think they are less likely to do it.”

Before her tenure ends, the artist wants to challenge local high school students to a snowball effect project of tidiness to clean their littered parking lot and “redeem themselves as a group.” 

She will capture it all on film and in art and who knows, make them stars?  At the very least ward them away from littering in their teens when the behaviour can suddenly take hold.

I trust the subject of litter in Susan Coolen’s hands. This project would work well in any city.

For more information:  www.kitchener.ca/berlintowerartspace

Standing on the litter observation deck gives me a gull's eye view of the problems.  Then, of course, I feel obliged to report my findings to you. As a publicity-mad boss of mine often repeated, “What's the point of doing anything if no one knows about it?”

The observation deck isn't a real place, mind you. It's a mental approach I use for studying littering. Cool detachment, scientific precision, just the bare facts, absent of emotion.  

From my perch I look for omissions, contradictions, missed opportunities and reasons why.  So I’m looking at CentreLine, the one-page info sheet that accompanies my Ontario vehicle plate sticker renewal form.

What a perfect publication for information about roadside litter!  When you total what Ontario and municipalities spend on cleaning up the stuff, you might think a caution to drivers to not litter would be higher on the list of priorities than an offer to purchase a vanity licence plate.

Roadside litter is now a declared hazard in countries as far flung as China and New Zealand, and closer to home in Texas and Illinois.  “Roadside litter” in the Chinese language recently made it into the Cambridge online dictionary so prevalent is the habit of littering from cars in China now. You might think I’m joking that  banana peels are in the top three items tossed from vehicles in China.  I’d hate to see an elder slip on one of those skins.  It takes two years for a banana peel to decompose on pavement.

Why is there no mention of litter in the handout that goes to every single licensed driver in the Province of Ontario?  Clearly the thinking behind this government insert hasn’t been updated in years. This is such a missed opportunity to focus on one of the Ministry of Transportation’s main responsibilities – clean highways.

CentreLine informs us that drinking and driving laws in Ontario have changed and hits us with a few ‘did you know?’ alcohol facts. It references distracted driving, no hands-on phone talk or texting or face up to $500 in fines.  We read about no smoking with kids in a car and the availability of the enhanced driver’s licence. There is contact information and details on how to access online Ministry of Transportation services.  

Half the 7- x 14-inch sheet from MTO spends way too many lines on three apparently frequently asked questions: what to do when approaching a stopped police vehicle with its lights flashing, who can use and how to use High Occupancy Vehicle lanes and how to figure out whether the vehicle needs a Drive Clean emissions test.

But does the sheet once mention not littering from vehicles, particularly the number one scourge of all litter bar none, from roadside to seaside, cigarette butts? The silence is beyond deafening. Something stinks worse than a littered butt smoldering in a grocery store parking lot.

Hello, MTO? Time for a major redesign and a fresh rewrite of that CentreLine insert.  Advertising Ontario’s litter laws should be there front and centre, and perhaps enforcement might not be far behind.

Ontario is weak on litter and a new law could make that situation a lot worse.  

September 4 is the last date for public comment on the Province of Ontario's proposed Waste Reduction Act, legislation that is silent on litter. We believe this is the time to be hands-on and address littering head-on.  



Bill 91 in Ontario, the Waste Reduction Act, leaves a loophole you can drive a truck through and then litter out its window afterwards. No self-respecting environmentalist would condone a province-wide waste reduction law that doesn't include a plan for dealing with littering.

As this photo validates, Ontario operates under an antiquated, hands-off approach to littering. The new bill attempts to write-off litter altogether by relying on the insidious industry term, "end of life waste".  This insider jargon means industry and government can legally ignore the issue of waste that is littered, such as the materials seen above, clogging the drains within a few meters of Ontario's laughably ineffective litter sign, advertising a law that is rarely enforced and routinely ignored.

Those chip bags, food wrappers, cups and gum on the ground – they may look dead, but they are not at the “end of life”. The bin is their coffin.  If they do not land in a bin, legislators let producers off the hook. This dimly lit view has led to Ontario’s failure to reach its 60 per cent diversion target. (Currently at 25%) It’s the reason why littering continues to be pervasive and growing in Ontario and why the provincial government gives the issue of litter as waste zero of its attention.

Fifty-five per cent of all littering is deliberate. The rest is accidental. Regardless, all littering is illegal.

I believe Ontario should deal with littering as it deals with waste reduction and diversion. A good start would be to delete all references to “end-of-life” waste and just call it what it all is: “waste.”

How can anyone credibly say that litter and waste don’t fit together?

You would be helping the litter prevention cause by telling the Ministry of Environment before September 4, 2013 that you object to litter being omitted from Ontario's proposed Waste Reduction Act. A simple sentence like that is all you need to say. Contact information, comment form and details about Bill 91 are here.

A waste management expert agrees it is prudent for me to sound the alarm over Bill 91, the proposed Waste Reduction Act in Ontario.  The legislation aims to change how we recycle in Ontario, involving waste producers more and setting up a hybrid system of third-party agency and producer self-policing. 

Ontario has not mastered the art of diverting waste. Far from it, collectively only 23 per cent of our total waste is saved from going to landfill. Nor has Ontario shown an acumen for making less waste, government ministries being among the bigger offenders. In Ontario, recycling programs vary depending on where you are in the province. The government shies away from setting uniform high standards for municipalities and waste producers.    

In fact, this legislation offloads much of the power to bodies outside of the Ministry of the Environment.  
That worries me.  So does the fact that the waste management sector is pushing hard for incineration waste-to-energy programs to count as “Recovery”, the Fourth “R” and to embrace 4Rs, as has occurred in the European Union.

In Ontario, we don’t need 4Rs in this bill. 3Rs are plenty if you do them right.  Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.  We should be sticking to our course of defining what it means to have the best recycling collection program in the world in our homegrown blue box approach. Set sustainability targets. Force places like banks, service stations, construction sites and public spaces to offer recycling.  We all know where the likely litter hosts are. Get full ICI participation from Industry, Commerce and Institutions. The province should be initiating awareness-raising campaigns and best practices, doing everything possible to elevate public thinking and action.

It would not hurt to tell the Ministry of Environment that we support 3Rs not 4 in Ontario’s proposed Waste Reduction Act to counteract the industry lobby, you can comment on Bill 91 here until September 4.

***

Another problem with Bill 91: It shuts the door to new deposit-return systems.  Any legislator worth his or her environmental salt will want to stand up and defend deposit-refund systems as part of the mix in Ontario, some of which involve small fees of a few pennies.  

Impetus for the cumbersome Bill 91 came from the government’s desire to be forever off the hot seat after its stewardship agency badly botched the roll out of eco-fees in 2010. Some of those eco-fees were quite steep.  Those costs would be built into the product pricing under Bill 91 and summarized on the price tag.

The fee I want to preserve is the effective, tried-and-true, deposit-return system.  Total recycling results in less litter and near perfect diversion.

Ontario Beer Stores show a 99% recycling rate for materials returned to their locations.  It’s a simple system that everyone understands.  Deposit-return has a place in the waste reduction regime.  No one’s going to quibble over a few pennies extra on a can of pop or a pack of smokes.

In the absolute political fever to erase eco-fees from the electoral memory and from the books, Ontario policy writers were not able to recommend viable deposit-return schemes such as are running in other provinces.

In a previous blog here one year ago I called for the establishment of a “litter school” administered by the courts. (“What governments could do”, August 20, 2012). Lo and behold today I read that a city is proceeding with something along the same lines.  So I’m not nuts after all, at least not for thinking this could and should be done. 

In Guyana they propose to fast track what they call environment crimes along a newly created branch of the law and order tree, an environment court.  This is where they will send an entire cross section of litter pulp, from two-bit litterers to big-time dumpers.  All will be trotted before a judge who will decide how firmly to apply the newly trumped up cleanliness laws which aim to make a dent in the garbage strewn landscape.

Fines and ticketing will be the order of the day once the Guyanese public has had time to become accustomed to the idea.  “Intensified public awareness” will occur during the grace period.  Reasonable and sound approaches, but how to ensure that litterers pay the fines?

In Rio de Janeiro the zero waste “Lixo Zero” cuts to the heart of enforcement by recording tax roll numbers of those ticketed for littering.  If the fine goes unpaid it will affect the offender’s ability to use credit cards or obtain loans. This new regime is being rolled out after a 51-day postponement while the city hosted a massive Catholic youth event, where pilgrims received litterbags upon arrival and participated in what appears to have been a litter-free papal visit and World Youth Day – a first for any city.

While some jurisdictions tiptoe around the edges of the littering dilemma, others dive right in and put the public mind to the task of creating litter prevention measures.  It doesn’t help that people don’t separate their garbage in Rio. The culture built up around people throwing trash on the street has raised sufficient alarm as to spawn a meaningful drive among Zero Wasters to tackle littering head-on. With government’s support they may well do it.

I don’t know about you, but I would definitely watch “Litter Court” if it became a TV show.