A ready-to-drink-from Chinatown coconut (or at least the one I purchased from K&K Specialty Tropical Fruit for the purpose of this article) is about 13 cm in diameter and 11 cm in height. The EcoMedia SilverBox garbage bins that clutter up Chinatown have three slots: one for cans and bottles that is a circle with a diameter of 12 cm; one for newspapers that is a rectangle of about 7 cm x 26 cm; and one for garbage that is a rectangle-like shape of about 11 cm x 26 cm. This presents a problem; in case you can't visualize it, the slots are too small for something that, in this neighbourhood, is a common piece of trash.
In her submission to the city as it crafted placement guidelines for new street furniture in mid-2006 [PDF], Karen Sun, the executive director of the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter, wrote that "when traditional round garbage bins were replaced with the [SilverBoxes], the garbage slots became too small to fit a coconut, and the slanted tops do not accommodate piling coconuts on top of the bin. As a result of the inappropriateness of the new garbage bins, piles of coconuts overflowed onto the sidewalks of Chinatown. This reinforced racial stereotypes about the cleanliness of Chinese people and businesses."
While the last statement is debatable, there was never much question that the proliferation of orphaned mesocarps was rather embarrassing, particularly from an infrastructure and waste-management point of view. "It also created more work for the City’s frontline workers," Sun continued. "This situation could have been avoided if the garbage cans were designed to accommodate the needs of the community in which they were placed."
True. Too bad the new street furniture is specifically designed to be "coordinated" across the city and thus inherently unresponsive to "the needs of the community" in which it is placed.
The other issue, though, is that even if the SilverBoxes were able to accommodate coconuts, that would be an awful lot of organic matter to toss into the garbage. The city, however, has no plans to extend organics collection to streetside receptacles. According to Robert Orpin, the director of Collections Operations for the city's Solid Waste Management Services division, there simply isn't the demand. Aside from dog feces, there's "not a large amount of organic material in the litter containers." If you have leftover food at a restaurant, Orpin offers as an example, you're not going to carry it out with you. (Unless you take it home, in which case you'll presumably dispose of it there.)
So how to reconcile the desire to conveniently toss out coconuts with the obligation to divert the fleshy husks from the waste stream? Delivering on a campaign promise to do something about the mess, Councillor Adam Vaughan worked out an arrangement with Solid Waste to put eight green bins in Chinatown especially for coconuts, from May 1st to October 1st of each year, with this being the second year. Set up alongside the SilverBoxes, the bins bear colour printouts depicting a coconut with a straw extending from it and the message "COCONUTS ONLY." (The city is in the process of replacing these with multilingual signage.) Each of the bins has a circular opening 15 cm in diameter cut in the lid, just wide enough to comfortably slip in the fruit.
This is an excellent compromise, but as the green bins eat up space on the already-congested sidewalks, in addition to the 11 square feet occupied by each SilverBox, it should only have to be a temporary solution. Nonetheless, the people I spoke to at the city weren't confident that the new Jeremy Kramer-designed bins being installed as part of the Coordinated Street Furniture Program will be any better in this regard.
The street furniture Request for Proposals (RFP) [PDF] originally stated that on the new bins the "opening for the recycling stream should be of a key hole design with a length of approximately 0.36 m x 0.10 m with the centre opening approximately 0.15 m in diameter," but that request was dropped [PDF] when one of the potential bidders found it "unclear": "It is referred to as a keyhole shape (which would put the circle at one end of the rectangle) but the physical description seems to have the circle in the centre of the rectangle." The city's outline of their desired waste slot, however, was more lucid and remained intact: "an oval shape design with dimensions of approximately 0.18 m x 0.15 m."
Here's what Astral's prototypes look like, but I unfortunately didn't think to bring measuring tape with me to City Hall that day. Judging by the photos, the slots look like they might accommodate coconuts, but Orpin said he was "doubtful." Though as there will still be no organics collected from the bins, it kinda doesn't matter.
Solid Waste, however, hasn't entirely ruled it out within the 20 years of the agreement with Astral Media. The RFP said that there should be "the option of organics in one of the compartments." When a potential bidder asked about that, the city clarified [PDF] that they do "not have any plans to collect organics from street receptacles at this time. However, the bin design should clearly demonstrate versatility of adapting to organic collection should the City decide to include organics in the future." The final contract with Astral requires the company to "work with the City to integrate 'Green Bin' organics collection into the litter/recycling receptacles," though that clause is probably just to give the city more room to maneuver in the future rather than an indication of any actual intentions they've already formulated.
If the bins can accommodate coconuts, the ideal resolution would be for Solid Waste to devote one of the three slots to organics in the Chinatown bins; I'm pretty sure they could even have the labels change seasonally, at Astral's expense. If the bins can't in fact accommodate coconuts, then Solid Waste should alert Astral right away and have the measurements adjusted or a handful customized.
We should not have to cede pedestrian space in order to have a reasonably sanitary Toronto. Just because the Clean & Beautiful City Secretariat fucked up the "beautiful" part with regards to the street furniture doesn't mean they have to screw up the other half of their mandate, too.
Jonathan Goldsbie is a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee.