[laurastevens]

As of April 5th the City of Hamilton will only collect one black bag of garbage per household. You are encouraged to use your green bin and recycling in order to cut down on the amount of garbage your house produces.

There are 3 grace periods where you may put out up to 3 bags:
New Years, Victoria Day and Thankgiving Day

A special consideration policy is available for households with someone who has a medical condition. You can apply at: http://www.hamilton.ca/CityDepartments/PublicWorks/WasteManagement/OneContainerLimitAppl ication.htm

For tips on how to get down to one bag of garbage a week check out: http://www.hamilton.ca/CityDepartments/PublicWorks/WasteManagement/

Green Bin Items:
- pizza boxes
- popcorn bags
- paper plates + cups
- waxed/parchment paper
- dryer lint

Recycle:
- plastic bags (shopping, outer milk, bread, sandwich - not zip lock)
- empty aerosol cans
- tetra packs
- coffee trays
- styrofoam containers
- milk and juice cartons
- aluminum foil and trays

Check out the facebook event at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=1048074 92885357&ref=ts

[sniderj]

My stupid landlord lied to us. She told us about this rule in September, as though it was already in place. I've been driving my garbage home to Waterloo where the recycling Nazis haven't won yet.

[Marlowe]

Same here actually. My landlord also told us it was already in effect.

[laurastevens]

This past year was a transition year where you could put out one black bag and one clear bag of garbage. Now they are switching to only one black bag. I'm sorry that you were misinformed - think of it as extra practise!

[lawleypop]

I love that my entire household thought that this was already in effect and our ****ing house smells like shit because of it. ._.

[adrian]

why are people complaining? I do about 1/4 of a bag per week, with 2-3 recycling bags and compost. It doesn't have to smell, put it outside!
Here is a GREAT place to see what can be recycled and what can't:
http://www.hamilton.ca/CityDepartmen...WhatGoesIn.htm

[JEFF_CHAN]

I'm gonna have like, 6 housemates in May. GG...

Not to mention 4 of those 6 currently live with me and they don't throw out crap unless I remind them. We've had a couple of cases where we're stuck with week-old trash because I was too busy to remind them or I asked them to and they just 'forgot'. Fun.

[RyanC]

We've been doing this at my house for years?

[lawleypop]

Originally Posted by adrian

why are people complaining? I do about 1/4 of a bag per week, with 2-3 recycling bags and compost. It doesn't have to smell, put it outside!
Here is a GREAT place to see what can be recycled and what can't:
http://www.hamilton.ca/CityDepartmen...WhatGoesIn.htm

Yea, let's put garbage outside. Because raccoons don't exist or anything. >_<

Should be pretty obvious why people are complaining by the above comments. xD

I don't know how the hell you manage that, we use 2-4 recycling bins per week, and both the upstairs and downstairs people compost. And we still have shit tons of garbage. (and by we I mean my roomates, since my cereal and potatoes are recycling)

Thanks for the link, but I know that we have magnets everywhere that tells us what we can and can't put, and we still often need more than 1 garbage bag. It's not that we're doing it wrong, it's that it's really hard when we've basically got 2 families living in one house.

[Maegs]

Originally Posted by lawleypop

It's not that we're doing it wrong, it's that it's really hard when we've basically got 2 families living in one house.

Same here, there's 8 people living in my house, no way we're going to have one bag of garbage per week

[Kathy2]

I've been doing it at my house for about a year now, and it's not too bad. I don't know how student houses are going to do it though. My boyfriend used to live with 10 other people. There's no way you can get that down to 1 bag.

[adrian]

Well, a few things:

Q: How is a multi-family house expected to keep to a ONE container limit for garbage?
A: All ‘eligible properties’ as defined in the Solid Waste Management By-Law 09-067 are subject to the one container limit for garbage, thus eligible properties with up to the maximum of 5 legal dwelling units would be allowed one container per unit each week. Non-legal or non-registered dwelling units are not allowed to put garbage at the curb.

So if you register as units, you can have up to 5 bags

Also, its not just 1 bag, it's one container:

Q: What is the definition of ‘one container’?
A: One plastic bag that does not contain more than 23 kilograms (50 pounds) of garbage.
One rigid, reusable container (garbage can) having a volume of less than 135 litres (30 gallons) and does not contain more than 23 kilograms (50 pounds) of garbage.
Either of these is considered ‘one container’.

from:
http://www.hamilton.ca/CityDepartmen...+A nswers.htm

[Maitland]

I too live with 9 other people, and if you are truly upset about this you should email the city councillor for our ward, Brian McHattie. As our respresentative (and a former lecturer at Mac) he should understand the unique situation of student housing and try to put measures in place on our behalf. I can't say whether or not he'll read your email, but it can't hurt to try.

[email protected]

[xxsumz]

1 bag of garbage eh...interesting. I guess now would be a good time to recycle...or could always go dump the garbage somewhere?

[lawleypop]

Originally Posted by xxsumz

1 bag of garbage eh...interesting. I guess now would be a good time to recycle...or could always go dump the garbage somewhere?

That's what we did at the beginning of the year. The girl who one of my housemates subletted the place to left the place in a ****ing uproar... we had bags and bags of garbage.

So around 11pm sunday night, we dumped our shit on lawns that had no garbage put out.

I too live with 9 other people, and if you are truly upset about this you should email the city councillor for our ward, Brian McHattie. As our respresentative (and a former lecturer at Mac) he should understand the unique situation of student housing and try to put measures in place on our behalf. I can't say whether or not he'll read your email, but it can't hurt to try.

I don't think anyone's upset about it. I think what we're upset about is that for the past 6 months we've been doing one thing when we could have put out more garbage.

Yes, our house literally had bags of garbage sitting around b/c we thought we couldn't put it out.