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Toronto鈥檚 garbage chief is Charlotte Ueta, 鈥淎cting Director of Policy, Planning & Outreach, Solid Waste Management Services Division.鈥� Imagine trying to live up to a grand title like that when people, tourists included, cannot complete a minor public task.

Clearly the city believes garbage is a massive bureaucratic problem. But citizens think garbage is simple. As I often remind my readers, the anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose book 鈥溾�� I urge you to read,听aptly describes dirt as 鈥渕atter out of place.鈥�

In Toronto, our litter is wrongly placed, therefore befouled. It violates borders; dog dirt mixes with soft plastic which then mixes with waxed cardboard, two of the previous being verboten if I grasp the rules correctly which I probably don鈥檛.

As the Star’s City Hall Bureau Chief Ben Spurr writes, less than one per cent of our yearly 5,000 tonnes of total garbage will be rescued and made anew. 鈥淎ny recoverable material is either so dirty or mixed in with nonrecyclable items that it鈥檚 impractical to extract, and it ends up in landfill.鈥澨�

In other words, we are a mess. True enough. I try not to walk anywhere on Thursdays, which is garbage pickup day in my neighbourhood, because the rows of bins left open smell of ancient death and rot, unspeakable fluids and detestable solids. Homeowners don鈥檛 clean their bins.

No wonder the garbage collectors are in a temper. No wonder they despise us. We are thoughtless; we have no moral follow-through.

There are better ways to collect recyclables. We might try bottle banks where people can dispose of glass and cans only, with special slots that only accept tube shapes (like kindergarteners putting shapes in the correct holes).

But we鈥檇 mess that up too. You know dog owners would put their little green bags in the holes. What wastrels people are, so busy coping with inflation, job loss, the widening collapse of global peace, and the wild-eyed park dweller and his mean child currently approaching them in the park with a hammer, oh just pick a slot.听

Ueta says she won鈥檛 remove the 鈥渞ecycling鈥� slot even though it鈥檚 only aspirational. As she told Spurr, the city would rather 鈥減romote positive behaviour and actually (get) folks utilizing the recycling compartment鈥� properly. We want to build on the successes and just enhance it with more public education.鈥� Awww.

This mirrors the battle over speed cameras. Raging drivers hate them even though they only affect speeders, and have serially cut them down, like angry babies throwing the shapes-in-holes game across the room. Even disconnected speed cameras work as reminders, just like Recycling slots.

Ueta鈥檚 using therapy-speak, the kind of jargon that guidance counsellors use on those recalcitrant stabby preteens we hear so much about. But she鈥檚 not wrong. We are adults. It鈥檚 a minimal ask. Can we not try?

What we really need is three slots in those bins, which should be made of metal, not plastic to set a planet-friendly example. The first should read FILTHY, the second PLASTIC AND PAPER, and the third FOR GOD鈥橲 SAKE YOU PEOPLE.

Politically, this would mean PASSIONATE INTENSITY-RIGHT for dirty realism, PASSIONATE INTENSITY-LEFT for recyclables, and LACKS ALL CONVICTION for people who can鈥檛 decide.

Look, I got an anti-war quote from Yeats鈥� 听into a column explaining trash-sorting to civilians. I did it to prove that yes, you can indeed earn a living from not one but two University of 海角社区官网liberal arts degrees. You鈥檙e welcome.