Garbage in Centretown

If you're wondering why your garbage hasn't been picked up today, it's because the City has changed the garbage collection dates in coordination with the switch to collecting curbside garbage only every other week (green bin is still collected every week, and black and blue box pickups are still on alternating weeks). The best I can tell is Centretown east of Bank is on Wednesday and west of Bank (to Bronson) is on Thursday. Homeowners should have gotten letters by now, but if you're a renter like me, you can use the City's online tool to find out your new collection date.

On a less disruptive note, the CCCA recently heard back from Ontario Electronic Stewardship about the e-Waste dropoff site fundraiser we had earlier this month. As the CCCA tweeted this past weekend,

Our #Centretown e-Waste site on Oct 6 saved 4.91 tons of electronics from going to landfill. Double our June yield! ^C twitter.com/CentretownCCA/…
— Centretown Citizens(@CentretownCCA) October 27, 2012

People came from across Centretown and beyond (one person said he was from Manotick!). The tracking form they give you only asks you to list the number of cars that pull up, but since only a quarter of Centretowners use a car as their primary mode of transportation, we had just as many walk-ups.

There were five of us there for most of the day to handle the sometimes constant flow of electronics. Jordan and I (in the back row) particularly enjoyed packing the electronics into the container so that they (a) wouldn't all fall down, and (b) filled every nook and cranny.

In order to do so, we sometimes had to climb on top of TVs, computer towers, and speakers. This made for a fun vantage point.

Some people put the electronics neatly back into its original packaging. Ironically, this made things more difficult for us, not less, since we had to remove all packaging and paper products. The remaining equipment sometimes made for challenging puzzle pieces to fit together, although (and it was fun to say this!) laptops are great for shimming large TVs to get them level. We got everything in pretty tight!

This angle shows just how deep the container is. Only the very end had any space left by the time we closed it. We probably couldn't have fit any more big TVs (at least not without more laptops to shim them!)

As mentioned in the tweet mentioned earlier, over twice the amount of electronics were collected on the October 6 event as at the CCCA's first one this past summer during the Minto Park Sale. This means that the CCCA raised twice the amount of funds, which are needed for the costly appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board of the City's rezoning of 96 Nepean Street.

Thank you to everyone who volunteered at the event, especially Alice who coordinated things with OES and McNabb. Thanks also to everyone who brought their old electronics, not only for helping us raise funds, but more importantly for keeping it out of the landfill! We'll be having another at the 2013 edition of the Minto Park Sale.

If you'd like to become a member of the CCCA, or if you'd just like to support the CCCA with a donation (not tax-deductible), visit the CCCA's website at www.centretowncitizens.ca. The CCCA's Annual General Meeting is on Wednesday, November 21. If you're interested in putting your name forward for one of the Board positions available, please contact me at charles at akben dot ca, as I am the chair of the Nominations Committee. CCCA Vice-President Rob Dekker is in charge of the committee that is organizing the non-election parts of the AGM, if you'd like to help out with that.