The next new bin: City eyes cost-savings through automation of yard waste pickup

Should Toronto adopt brown bins for yard waste? About 1,000 brown bins are in use across Toronto as part of a pilot project to test new means of collecting yard waste.

On garbage day in Leaside, when the black and green bins are dragged to the curb, brown ones often follow.

Nearly identical to the plastic containers filled with trash and organics, the brown bins are stuffed with yard waste, an alternative to brown bags or non-standardized garbage cans.

A thousand of the new bins are currently in use across Toronto, as part of a city pilot project to test a new means of collecting yard waste.

The City of Toronto is testing brown bins as part of a new pilot project. (Natalie Johnson)

“We’re looking for efficiencies in collection where we don’t have various types of containers out [for yard waste],” Interim Director of Collection Operations Lisa Duncan told CTV News Toronto.

The goal of the project is to assess whether automated collection - which is possible with standardized bins - is more cost-efficient than manual pickup.

The new brown bins clip on to the backs of the solid waste trucks, meaning workers don’t have to pick up and dump the yard waste into the trucks themselves.

Automating the process could save money by allowing the city to staff those trucks with one operator instead of two. It could also reduce the physical strain on solid waste crews and reduce the potential for injuries, the city says.

“I think in theory it’s a good idea,” brown bin user Richard Osborne told CTV News Toronto. But he points out that yard work is so seasonal that owning a single brown bin doesn’t always make sense.

“The problem is that, with yard waste, unlike regular garbage, you have one week where you have enough for six or seven bags, and then you don’t have any for three or four weeks,” he said.

That means that residents end up storing the bin on weeks where they don’t need it and then have to supplement it with bags or other containers when they’ve done a lot of yard work.

“There are some challenges with it as far as when you do have the overflow yard waste,” Duncan said.

“If it’s fully automated it works really well, but when [crews] have to start manually throwing additional yard waste, it’s now a two-stream system.”

There are currently two sizes of brown bin available for pilot-project users, equal in volume to the large and medium sizes of the city’s black bins. They were distributed to various homeowners based on the size of their properties.

The city accepts all the same forms of yard waste in the new bins as were previously accepted in other containers or paper bags: leaves, mulch, weeds, and small tree limbs.

Grass clippings, sod, and soil are not permitted.

The city will continue the pilot through the heavy autumn yard waste season and evaluate the results at the end of year. Staff will then provide a recommendation to council on whether to expand the program city-wide.