Joel Ceausu – The Suburban LJI Reporter
Snowdon resident Katie never liked seeing trash around the neighborhood but didn’t realize how bad it was until she got a dog almost two years ago. “When you walk your dog, you spend more time looking down,” she told The Suburban. “You have more time to notice.”
“It began to upset me more,” she recalls. “Rather than looking up at the nice sky, you’re looking down and seeing garbage.” She began stopping to pluck trash off the ground. “It’s easy to do, like pick up a bottle. I know I’m going to the garbage with the dog bag anyway so on my way I’ll pick up things that are easy to gather. Then I realized it’s too much and I’m not seeing the results.”
Toting gloves and bags, she collected more, particularly between Isabella and Côte St-Luc Road, to compare hauls and measure her contribution. A bread bag per walk, per day. For a year. That’s a lot of trash.
“I’d like to say Earnscliffe is Montreal’s cleanest street,” she laughs, “but it’s not true because it’s a never-ending job.”
She’s only seen litterbugs in action twice: a man emptying his car, another tossing garbage on the ground. Her trash bounty mostly includes leftovers from waste pick-up, candy wrappers, tissue, coffee cups, bottles and cigarette packaging. “There are less masks now,” she says, “and cigarette butts are a tragedy that I don’t pick up because it’s too much.”
She’s more disappointed than angry, and doesn’t feel taxpayer-funded services are insufficient. “There is the city’s brigade de propreté but it’s more that people are not careful.” Montreal’s brigade de propreté actually targets commercial areas of arterial streets like Sherbrooke, Côte des Neiges, Queen Mary and Décarie, from approximately mid-April to November.
Snowdon councillor Sonny Moroz wants more modest-sized bins at the same locations. Too large he says, and people dump personal garbage; too small and they fill up fast so people chuck garbage elsewhere. Multiple bins at one location can handle overflow. “The city can collect more garbage without making more visits.”
He tells residents to report issues to 311 and forward reference numbers to the city councillor to escalate when urgent or if issues persist.” The Montréal – Resident Services app can also help, auto-producing and emailing you a reference number. “Whenever anyone tells me about an issue I go on the app and make the request immediately. I ask them to do as well, multiple requests to the same issue escalates the importance.”
The increase in local trash could also be due to people thinking one little scrap doesn’t matter; but when 200 think the same way, you end up with a pigsty, Katie agrees. “You know Monkland is very nice, it’s very clean, but Queen Mary is extremely dirty. Why is that?”
Moroz says Monkland’s local business association ensures a certain level of cleanliness, adding the borough recently warned Queen Mary merchants “that they would be sending more inspectors and issuing more tickets, but I don’t think I’ve seen it any cleaner now than in previous years. At the same time, we reduced commercial garbage collection from two days to one, and now we are asking businesses to compost.”
On her walk, Katie says she’ll keep doing her part. “Maybe I’ll pick up more when I retire,” she laughs. “It would be nice for our community to realize a small effort on their part could make a real difference for the cleanliness of our neighbourhood.”