Swirling vortex of litter at community centre
Garbage a perpetual presence at Dufferin St. entrance, south of Dupont St.
Some things go the way the wind blows, like the trash that collects outside the Wallace Emerson Community Centre.
Everybody despises litter, even people who thoughtlessly toss their garbage on the ground.
If you asked them, they’d probably tell you someone else is responsible, and that the guilty parties are swine.
When it is discarded one piece at a time, nobody thinks it’ll change the landscape.
But if a thousand people each dropped a paper coffee cup along one block of a city street, imagine the mess it would make.
That’s an apt analogy for the situation at Wallace Emerson, where the area around the main entrance, on Dufferin St., south of Dupont St., is constantly covered by litter.
Dan Abramsky emailed to say “garbage perpetually peppers the east lawn” of the community centre, named after the nearby intersection of Wallace and Emerson Aves.
“It’s been a problem since I can remember. I have never seen the lawn free of trash. It’s a real mess.”
We went there and found a walkway that descends from the community centre’s main doors into the surrounding park, thoroughly covered with street trash.
The garbage was also strewn across an embankment between the descending walkway and a sidewalk that runs along the west side of Dufferin.
Some of the junk looks like it’s been there a long time.
As we looked closer at the litter, it was apparent that a lot of it was from a McDonald’s just a few metres north of the community centre, in the Galleria Shopping Centre, on the southwest corner of Dufferin and Dupont Sts.
Worse, the community centre’s trash and recycling bins are right outside the Dufferin St. doors, where they seem to attract litter that is not put into them but just tossed in their direction. Status: Matthew Cutler, who deals with media for parks and recreation, said a community centre official told him the configuration of the building and the adjacent embankment causes wind swirls that pick up trash from the street and drop it into the walkway.
Given the location of the McDonald’s, there’s lots of litter for the wind to dump on the property, he said.
And with pickup of trash bins done on Dufferin St., there’s nowhere else but the area near the main doors to store them, said Cutler, adding that staff has been asked to clean up the trash and keep it from accumulating. What’s broken in your neighbourhood? Wherever you are in Greater Toronto, we want to know. To contact us, go to thestar.com/yourtoronto/the_fixer or call us at 416-869-4823 email jlakey@thestar.ca. To read our blog, go to thestar.com/news/the_fixer. Report problems and follow us on Twitter @TOStarFixer.