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Recycling blue bins and dumpsters are disappearing around my Fairview neighbourhood. To be sure, it's happening slowly, so a lot of binners don't see it. I happened to trade binning for hourly-wage employment between January 2008 and January 2010, and when I started binning again, in May 2010, the reduction in accessible dumpsters and blue bins was glaringly obvious. Lots of dumpsters which had been accessible for years, were padlocked, or locked behind new wood, or steel, gated enclosures. Worse yet -- often the new locked enclosures held the dumpsters and the blue bins. Where I could speak to the managers of buildings who'd closed off access to all their trash and recyclables, I received the same basic answer -- It was to stop people from being able to illegally dump garbage in the dumpsters -- locking up the blue bins was just incidental. Uh-huh. But, I'm familiar with the phrase "killing two birds with one stone." Binning isn't always performed tidily, and it's a lie to say it can always be done quietly. If locking up the blue bins means binners can't root through them at four in the morning, then, quite literally, residents aren't going to lose sleep over it.


That said, the blue bins really are often just a casualty of the building managers war on illegal dumping in their dumpsters, from, to mention a few:

• Renters moving out of the neighbourhood, producing a steady stream of trash -- the contents of their fridges, their furniture, TVs, mattresses; whatever they don't want to move, they want to toss, and they don't care where.


• Fly-by-night construction trades people -- one person operations with a guy, a truck, and tools, operating out of their homes or apartments. they dump their construction waste wherever. earning at least a "drive-by-other people's-dumpsters-at-night" designation.


• Dog owners. Small potatoes by comparison, but when they deign to pick up after their dogs, they throw the little bags of their pet's poop everywhere -- in anyone's dumpster, garbage bin, recycling bin, whatever -- drives some building managers nuts.

This is all about money of course. The buildings pay for dumpster use, effectively by volume. So they pay more for illegal dumping in their dumpsters. But, by locking away their dumpsters, buildings lose the benefit of binners reducing the volume of their garbage. For the binners, a shrinking supply of returnable containers, and other re-purposeable, and re-sellable materials reduces their income potential, or, at least, reduces their return on effort. And the City of Vancouver loses out on the goal of diversion -- keeping things out of the landfills.



Above: The day before they ripped up the parking lot to extract an old, rusted, oil tank, I watched the building manager install the camera (circled in red). He told me the camera was to deter people illegally dumping garbage in the building's dumpster, not to watch binners. Hmm.
Above top: There are many tasteful examples of how to enclose your dumpster and recycling blue bins -- this is not one of them. It seems one building manager has gone squirrelly over illegal dumping. Click the images to enlarge.

I'm not recycling when I collect returnable containers out of the recycling blue bins, but I am recycling when I get them out of dumpsters, and the garbage; some days, 20 per cent of my returnables come out of dumpsters. And there is an entire rank of binners who focus on dumpster diving -- they keep literally tons, and tons of returnable containers, and all types of resellable merchandise out of our landfills. I should say that a lot of the more professional dumpster divers are adept at acquiring keys for the various lock types, so they aren't so inconvenienced by locked dumpsters, but that's a small proportion of binners.

Dumpster keys explored and explained ►
See the love for dog owners on the front of the "No Dumping" building ►
The snotty-green dumpster enclosure disappears! ►