Toronto to export garbage at retail level

Well, that's not what the official intent of the proposed $15 per month garbage collection fee, but it will be one of the most likely outcomes.

Toronto homeowners could soon be paying an average fee of $15 a month to have their garbage hauled away. But Mayor David Miller is pledging he'll cut property taxes by the same amount.

Households that toss the most trash also would pay the highest bills, as a way of encouraging composting and recycling, according to a city staff proposal that would overhaul the city's garbage-collection system.

Garbage collection, especially in a large urban area like Toronto, is one of the classic "free rider" problems. Everyone benefits by having municipal garbage collected and taken away (regardless of whether the service is public or private), and few of us would want to revert to a no-collection scheme: it's a public health concern. How to allocate the costs of these services is always a problem, because of the free riders: those who pay little or nothing toward the costs, but receive benefits regardless.

Many municipalities have gone with various forms of garbage bag tags: each household receives a set number of tags, which must be attached to the bag for the bag to be collected. This works fine . . . as long as the number of tags issued is proportional, and that extra tags are not over-priced. And also, that the scheme isn't being used as a political weapon to force behavioural changes on the participants.

Most people, most of the time, will be willing to go along with bag tags (or some other equivalent pay-as-you-pitch scheme), but some won't. When we lived in Toronto, for example, we would frequently discover that one or more of our neighbours had added their trash to ours . . . pushing us over the limit for what would be picked up. So we were left, literally, holding the bag.

At one point, we actually saw someone doing this. The person was walking past our house, and dropped a garbage bag on our lawn, and was out of sight by the time we got out to the street. Fortunately for us, there was an addressed envelope in the bag, so we were able to track down and return the bag to its origin. What was truly puzzling was that the bag came from an apartment building about a block away . . . where the garbage was collected communally. This person had gone to the trouble of taking the garbage bag from the building . . . probably even walking past the garbage chute, out onto the street, then carried it past half a dozen other houses before selecting our lawn as an appropriate resting spot.

This person wasn't even being personally inconvenienced, yet chose to impose her externalities on us. Multiply that by all the folks who'll prefer to just find a quiet area along the road to dump their trash, rather than pay for having it collected. Pickering, Markham, and Mississauga are certainly going to discover a significant increase in the amount of dumped trash along their borders with Toronto.