When Trash = Cash

When Todd heard about the city workers' strike, his initial reaction was anger. "I love this town," he said, during a phone call. "I grew up here."

Many have felt the same way, and most have left it at that. But Todd had other considerations. "I work for myself," he said, "and I really felt the pinch." He couldn't understand why city workers would walk off their dependable jobs, especially in a time of economic unpredictability.

Todd said he began his temporary sideline in garbage as a way of supplementing the income from his fledgling independent construction business, which he started just a few months ago. He said he has four children. The implication was that every dollar made hauling garbage was extremely helpful, though he never said that outright.

The major problem with the semi-pro trash-hauling business, the way Todd practices it, is that it's illegal. If you, as a private citizen in Toronto, haul garbage for other people on a regular basis, Ontario's Ministry of the Environment considers you and your vehicle to be a "Waste Management System." To haul within the law, you would first need to file an Application for Approval of a Waste Management System. The filing fee starts at five hundred dollars. That's a large sum, especially considering the economics of clandestine garbage collection during the strike. (An article published yesterday in the Star has much more detail.)

For Todd, the job works like so: His clientele is focused in an extremely narrow residential area. With his brother's help, he posted flyers in strategic places in his target neighborhoods. Then, for good measure, he did a little self-promotion: "Basically I just approached people and said 'are you interested in garbage removal.'"

Todd charges five dollars for every black garbage bag he picks up. Other, similar services we've seen advertised have been charging similar rates, in an odd (and extremely rank) demonstration of the free market's ability to stabilize itself. Some of these other services are infinitely more sketchy and post-apocalyptic than Todd's one-man operation. Another is brazenly well organized, complete with online ordering. Yet another was for charity.

In three hours, during the morning prior to our phone conversation, Todd said he'd made $150—the proceeds from approximately thirty bags of trash. He's not looking to expand his business any further. He said he stopped taking on new clients as soon as he read, in the newspaper, that a licence was necessary (though the only direct warnings he's received have come in the form of polite phone calls from striking workers, asking him to stop what he's doing).

For a part-timer like Todd, paying five hundred dollars for a permit would mean giving up the equivalent of most of a week's profits, plus the opportunity cost of time spent waiting for his application to be processed. With the entire scheme dependent upon a strike that could (theoretically) end at any time, getting a permit purely for the sake of being on the up-and-up is an impracticality, if not an impossibility.

Plus, an interruption of service would be a let-down for his clients, as we found out this week when we joined him for a pickup.

The view from within the van.

Todd's vehicle was not the open flatbed truck we were expecting. He drives an enclosed panel van. It was still heaped with those thirty bags of garbage he'd told us about on the phone. They formed a mound that reached halfway up the sides. The interior of the van had that unique household waste smell that is somehow both rotten and sweet. Todd handed us a miniscule spray bottle of Febreeze and told us to give the trash mountain four or five good squirts.

It was a large amount of waste in a relatively small space, but Todd seemed used to it. In the beginning, he would offload it all at the city's designated dump sites (a few bags at a time, so as not to invite suspicion), but wait times quickly became intolerable. Now he drives to a dumpsite outside city limits and pays a nominal fee to get rid of his haul.

The day's first client lived in a basement apartment. Todd knocked on the door. Minutes later, a woman with curly hair emerged in a housecoat and handed Todd a single bag of trash, which he threw in the back of the van. He told her he wasn't charging her today, but she tried to insist. "No! I want to pay you," she said, beaming, as we climbed back into the van and left.

Todd said that the people whose trash he takes tend to be single mothers and people without cars, but that they're still a diverse group, within those parameters. "Everybody has garbage," he quipped. He said his clients are always very grateful to see their black bags go (even if CUPE and the province aren't).

"I feel like a drug dealer," he said.

Todd might technically be an outlaw, but he's also sort of a hero.

Photos by Steve Kupferman/Torontoist.