Toronto garbage

There's currently a garbage worker's strike in Toronto. (Other municipal workers in the same unit are also on strike.) This is fine -- I'm all for higher wages; my own union threatened as much in our negotiations -- but some of the temporary measures taken to deal with the garbage are terrible. Toronto creates a lot of garbage, which is essentially invisible as long as it's getting taken away on a daily basis. Now that it is lingering, the public trash cans are overflowing mounds of slowly rotting trash on street corners.

While jogging, I came across a public park with an outdoor hockey rink, surrounded by chain-link fence and stacked full of bags of garbage. Further running around the area revealed that, for the duration of the strike, this neighborhood had established a temporary drop-off at the playground. Gross. It was fragrant from blocks downwind. Yuck.

The union certainly picked the right season to go on strike; in the winter, we could just store the garbage outside and freeze it for months without a thought.


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