We got our Blue Behemoth..
Nearly broke my arm maneuvering it off my front porch to the curb and it's only half full.
Please take special note of the instructions that are helpfully provided with your new Behemoth Bin:
- Place your Blue Bin a half-metre (approximately 2 feet) away from your Green Bin. There should be 3 metres (10 feet) of clearance above your Blue Bin.
- Do not place Blue Bins behind or on top of snow banks. Please make sure they are clearly visible and accessible.
- If you occasionally have overflow recycling, either keep the extra material and set it out in your Blue Bin at your next collection; or consider asking your neighbours if they have room in their Blue Bin.
My remarks on the new Behemoth Bins.
1. I don't have that much frontage on my lot to allow for 2 feet between the Green bin and the Behemoth bin because of a city-owned tree.
2. 10 feet of clearance above the Behemoth Bin?? So... who's responsible for cutting down the City-owned tree to allow for the 10 feet of clearance that is required here? I'm certain the City will not do it willingly and I doubt the garbage collectors will have their chainsaws along (Union rules, I'm sure). The city will probably charge me with cruelty to a living organism if I get my hands on a chainsaw and do the job myself. So... I should park my Behemoth bin in the middle of the road... no wait... the tree reaches out across the road too. (Yes, I have called the city and asked them to cut off branches - more than once but they only came by once and gave it a light trim and it took them three years to get around to doing that much after my initial request.)
3. "Do not place bins on top of snow banks". What temperate zone were they thinking we all live in when the geniuses at City Hall worked this one out? Again - that means the Behemoth Bin will be placed in the middle of the road -but only after 1/3 of that city-owned tree is cut down. Oh - never mind... the damn thing is so unmanagable and heavy I couldn't possibly wrestle it to the top of even a small snow bank - so I guess it has to be the middle of the road.
4. See my opening remark - this thing is a MONSTER. Where the heck are they expecting people to store them? Many of us in the downtown area do NOT have easy access to our back yards except through our houses. Do we just park it on the front postage-stamp-sized lawn and consider it a "Feature" instead of an EYESORE?? In my home, we kept our recycling bins on our small front porch. With the new Behemoth Bin on the front porch I can't even see out my front window. I'm middle aged, not overweight and generally in pretty good shape and even I had a very tough time wrestling this thing off my front porch and down to the curb - and it's only HALF FULL. I pity anyone who is elderly or even slightly infirm.
5. "Ask your neighbours if they have room in their Blue Bin". Umm.... correct me if I'm wrong... We get nasty notes, refusal to pick up recycling and possibly even fined if we put the wrong stuff in our Bins... so I'm supposed to allow my above-average-intelligence neighbours to dump their overflow into my Behemoth Bin? (Now, we all know that ALL of our neighbours are the above-average-intelligence type who *never* do anything to annoy or cause trouble for each other, right?) I can clearly see that my neighbour's new Behemoth bin is presently overflowing with all of the garbage bags full of what one assumes is supposed to be recyclable materials - you know, the stuff we're not supposed to be putting into garbage bags..
6. Those guys who go around picking through everyone's recycling bins in the middle of the night looking for refundable bottles or recyclable material that they can collect and turn in for money... What will they do with the Behemoth Bins? Turn the contents out onto the street, take what they want and then... collect the rest up and gently place it back into the Behemoth Bin so as not to disturb the area residents? Gee, I'm sure we all remember how quiet they were about rummaging through the old Blue boxes..
7. As for the City having no intention of collecting up all of the old Blue and Grey boxes they provided us with - I have an idea... We can all deliver them to City Hall and let THEM put them to other uses. Surely they can use them to store books, paper, use them as foot stools or stand on them to reach things stored on upper shelves. Or, maybe they'll just use them to store their toys in them.
Obviously I have some issues with the new Behemoth Bins... but there's not much point in my calling my local councillor to complain about it because I'm stuck with Sandra Bussin, the Heil-Miller clone. (Please don't credit me with the "Heil-Miller" remark - I have it on very good authority that's the name the staff at City Hall affectionately call him.)
I really, truly wish that someone with half a brain would run against him next election. I did not vote for him last time, nor did I vote for Bussin but the alternate choices were pretty weak. If only next time there was a real alternative and Miller-time could finally be over.
