On a recent Saturday, Jeff Ketelaars double-bagged the gross parts of his trash, along with the more pleasant dry parts, and packed both into sturdy cardboard boxes. Then he mailed his garbage to the company responsible for waste collection in Aurora.

“I just couldn’t leave this alone. I didn’t want to be helpless. I came in and I told my daughter, ‘I’m going to mail my garbage,’ and she looked at me like I had two heads,” he says.

The Town of Aurora says this is the first time someone has mailed their trash in protest.

“It’s an unfortunate way to respond to the situation, but if that’s how this resident chose to do it, that’s his choice I guess,” said Ilmar Simanovskis, Aurora’s director of infrastructure and environment services.

Green For Life (GFL) Environmental Corp. takes care of waste collection in Ketelaars’ Aurora neighbourhood. The trucks come every Thursday, and in his experience, later in the day, he says.

On Dec. 11, a very snowy day, his garbage and recycling weren’t picked up, so he called to ask why. He says he was told the bags weren’t at the curb.

“It hit me halfway through the conversation — wait a minute, I’ve got a camera and I bet it’s on the camera,” he says.

Clips from his motion-activated security camera, which he has posted online, show the trash and recycling going out at 9:38 a.m., and a garbage truck driving by at 6:38 p.m., driving the opposite direction at 6:58 p.m, followed by a recycling truck at 8:20 p.m. and 8:29 p.m.

Frustrated by seeing the trucks ignoring his offering, he made a tongue-in-cheek video about the intrigue.

I have turned on the Ads for this video to raise money for an Aurora charity - On December 11th, GFL Environmental Waste collectors, contracted to the Town of Aurora, Ontario, failed to collect curbside waste. When contacted, GFL denied that they failed to provide their service to the customer and the Town of Aurora could do nothing but pass the buck.

In 2007, the Town of Aurora, along with five other York Region municipalities, awarded their waste collection contract to Turtle Island Recycling Co., which amalgamated with GFL in 2012.

Ketelaars works for the United Food and and Commercial Workers union, but says that has nothing to do with this issue. He hasn’t had a major problem with garbage in his six years living in Aurora, aside from the odd note telling him there’s too much stuff in the bag.

“I can’t complain,” he says. “I couldn’t complain before.”

He said he would have understood if GFL had told him things were complicated by the snow.

“All I wanted was some acknowledgement that they missed it, some assurance that next week I wouldn’t have twice as much garbage and they weren’t going to take it … Instead I was told my garbage wasn’t by the curb.”

In the spirit of playfulness and to make a point about customer service, he spent $63 mailing four boxes of his trash.

“The guy who accepted the mail, he was confused too, because he said, ‘What’s in this?’ and I said, ‘It’s garbage,’ and he didn’t really want to ask, and there were people in the lineup I was telling my story to, and my daughter was just trying to find something to hide under, she was so embarrassed,” he says.

Simanovskis says Aurora shares a database with GFL, and also investigates complaints. About 20 percent of complaints are “not-picked-up calls,” and “upon investigation it was either because they were late set-outs, or because the material was unacceptable for pickup,” he explains.

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He says GPS indicates the trucks came by the Ketelaars residence before 7:30 a.m. on the day in question. Simanovskis says Ketelaars missed that early morning pick-up, and the trucks that appear in the evening on the video footage are likely just driving through the area, and would be discouraged from making late-day pick-ups if they’d already been by.

“It’s not an indication that they’re taunting him,” he says. “You can have a truck going by your house more than once. He can complete his route and then go back through your neighbourhood to go to the next route.”

When asked for comment, GFL said it had nothing to add to the town’s explanation. Ketelaars disputes the town’s version of events.

Ketelaars says he reviewed his security footage from 5:55 a.m. onward:

“No GFL trucks drove by at all. One private snowplow drove by a couple times, a white van drove by and a pickup truck drove by. Other than that, it was just me taking my trash out and heading off to work,” he wrote in an email.

He also doesn’t understand why garbage trucks would be driving through his area on their way to somewhere else, as he lives on a cul-de-sac.

Ketelaars said there appeared to be about “half a dozen” homes in his neighbourhood where refuse wasn’t collected, as evidenced by photographs in his video, which were taken the next day. He didn’t know the circumstances for the other left-behind items, just that they were there.

Vaughn Dues, who lives on the street, remembers the date in question —his birthday. He was out for lunch and dinner. He knows his garbage and recycling were taken but doesn’t have a clue what time.

“I just assumed everything was normal,” he said.

“Recycling is usually first thing in the morning, pretty early, garbage is usually in the afternoon,” said Doug Manson, who also lives on the street, and hasn’t had any issues with garbage collection. He had not committed the timeline of Dec. 11 to memory but said he “wouldn’t be surprised if it was even later that day because of the snow.”

The town is trying to use the incident as an educational opportunity:

“Our message to our residents is always: ‘Have your waste out by 7 a.m.’ it’s not predictable as to when the truck is going to come by,’” says Simanovskis.