Senior’s trash picked up over a week late

[attach]6381[/attach]Josh Matlow took matters into his own hands when an elderly constituent’s garbage had yet to be disposed of more than a week after the scheduled pickup time.

After the constituent complained, his office tried to track down the trash collection provider Green For Life Environmental and appropriate city staff to retrieve the trash.

With the garbage still festering on Aug. 14, the St. Paul’s councillor paid a curbside visit to the Chaplin Crescent and Lascelles Boulevard home.

“These residents had been promised so much, it hadn’t been delivered, so I said, ‘To hell with that, I’m just going to go get it for them.’ ”

Luckily for Matlow’s car trunk, a city pickup truck arrived at the same time and took away the trash bags.

The leftover trash may have been a result of a missed collection, one of several reported during the first week of private waste collection in neighbourhoods west of Yonge Street.

Half of Matlow’s ward still receives garbage pickup from a public union. He said in the first two weeks of private rollout, he received about a dozen complaints about new collection, and a few constituents said they thought the new collectors were doing a good job.
Matlow, who voted in favour of private pickup west of Yonge, said it’s too early to start judging the new collection.

“The test will be if [Green For Life] and the city can learn from the errors made the first day, and … clean up their act.”

Mayor Rob Ford has said in the past he would like to expand privatized garbage collection east of Yonge, but that it would likely be a priority for another term of office, should he be re-elected.