In 2008, Toronto homeowners were faced with a real incentive to divert the waste they produced from landfill, when the cost of collection moved from the property tax bill to a special rate-supported budget and the cost of garbage collection was calculated based on the size of the bin a household selected.

Big bins cost more — $190 a year in the first year. The very smallest bin, which allowed really just one regular-sized bag of garbage to be tossed a week, actually netted a refund of $10 — a property-tax-subsidized incentive for residents who were serious about reducing, recycling and reusing the waste they produced.

In 2020, the last vestiges of that incentive will continue to vanish. The cost of small bins this year will nearly double, going to $185.65 next year from $99.71 in 2019, while the rebate on the medium-sized bins will be finished, so the annual rate will go from $241.62 to $323.20.

In other words, the financial incentive is starting to disappear — and by 2022 it will be gone entirely, as every Torontonian receiving residential garbage collection will pay the full cost of tossing garbage.

Rick Ciccarelli is an executive member of the Mount Dennis Community Association and an organizer with the Toronto Eco-Neighbourhoods Initiative Resource Group. Although as an apartment dweller he is not directly impacted by the rate increase, he worries that removing the incentive is the wrong move.

“My initial reaction is that taking the incentive away from getting people engaged in this program is a step in the wrong direction,” he said. “I think the city needs to do a major marketing job on recycling. And any kind of incentive to get more effective recycling is good.”

Promoting recycling as something other than a pocketbook issue is much on the mind of city hall. Matt Keliher, Toronto’s general manager of Solid Waste Management Services, said that the city has been moving away from subsidizing the cost of collection for a number of years, as the intention was “to have more of a direct user pay system in solid waste, where the revenue that’s generated through the rate is linked to the cost,” he said.

Keliher said that a major reason for that move is simply that the subsidy for smaller users didn’t work.

Homeowners who initially ordered the larger, more costly garbage bins have not been incentivized to move to the smaller bins — and people with the smallest bins have not always been the best recyclers.

“At the end of the day, it isn’t the financial piece that’s driving it. Just because you have a large bin doesn’t mean that you aren’t diverting. That’s one of the stigmas put on to people with large or extra large bins. Sometimes if you have a large bin, you don’t fill it all the time but you pay for the convenience. It doesn’t mean you don’t do your part in diverting.” He added that people with smaller bins can sometimes slip waste into the recycling blue bins or the composting green bins — creating a contamination problem.

Marian Booy, who is a member of the grass-roots environmental group Green 13 in Parkdale—High Park, has been working with her neighbours to promote recycling through other means than financial.

“Not enough people have converted to the smaller bin,” she said. “Either they’re not aware or the city has not done a good enough job in promoting the cost savings — or people are afraid when going to a smaller bin they won’t have quite enough room for their garbage.”

She said that education is crucial, as is the general reduction in packaging.

“Even with recycling, there are all these plastics that aren’t good for the recycling bin,” she said. “I have to constantly go to my sheet of what plastics are able to go into the blue bin or not. It’s a very complicated process, and we also need to go to the industry and say, ‘Stop producing these plastics that can’t be recycled.’”

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Education is the city’s main tool now in promoting better recycling, Keliher said, and the city is pushing the message through calendars and marketing campaigns — and gentle enforcement.

“It’s really about getting the information out to our residents on where the materials go, and the other piece we’re pushing is the first two R’s (of the 3 R’s) which is reduce and reuse. If you reduce the amount of material that you purchase there’s very little chance the materials will get into the wrong stream if you don’t have that material at all.”