Last week on my street’s garbage day I strolled outside for my daily run to my favorite coffee place, only to find some of my garbage strewn across the sidewalk. The recyclers had already come and gone, but the garbage truck hadn’t yet. I picked up the debris and threw it back in the bin, only to discover that all of my recycling had actually been dumped into the garbage bin. It wasn’t just dumped on top, either. The garbage had been lifted out, the recycling dumped in at the bottom, and the garbage replaced on top of the recycling.

Thinking back, this wasn’t the first time I had noticed pieces of my garbage littering the street and sidewalk. I had always had it in the back of my mind that bits and pieces must have flown about while the garbage truck was emptying the bin. Now I think it has always been from the recyclers trying to hide our recycling under our garbage.

This week I decided to set up my camera and try to capture the event. The recyclers come at 6:30 or so in the morning, but they are very loud and always wake me up. This time I managed to remember to jump out of bed when I heard them coming, and opened the window binds to watch what was happening.

What was happening, it turns out, is that on each side of the street a man would run along and dump each home’s recycling bin into the garbage bin it sat next to. The recycling truck drove down the street, following them. How cheeky is that?

You can piece together what happened in these photos. They are blurry since the light was quite dim, the first from late at night after placing the garbage on the curb and the remaining from the early morning.

Recycling on my street

I have since called the city council, and they will supposedly be dealing with the situation “within 24 hours”.