Mike Fleury doesn't like what he's been hearing on the streets. The word is the City of Vancouver may soon order the locking of garbage Dumpsters.

“It's gonna hurt,” Fleury told the Georgia Straight as he stared at the goods he's laid out to sell on a sidewalk along East Hastings Street. His wares included four batteries still sealed in a pack, power adapters, electric cords, paintbrushes, and an old belt—all taken from garbage bins he had scavenged. He had earlier sold his bottles and cans at a recycling depot.

Before going on welfare and diving into bins six years ago, the 49-year-old native of King Creek, Ontario, was working at the Vancouver waterfront as a cargo loader. Then he hurt his back at work.

Noting that his welfare cheque barely covers his daily needs, Fleury said that he makes about $15 per day rummaging through other people's throwaways. “To tell you, it's embarrassing,” he said. “I don't like doing it, but I have to make money.”

Paul Heraty, a communications coordinator at City Hall, told the Straight that the city's engineering-services department is conducting studies that will serve as a basis for a new bylaw requiring the locking of Dumpsters of at least one cubic yard in volume.

“It could be as late as the summer of '07 before it is enacted,” Heraty said when asked when to expect the mandatory locking of Dumpsters. “It could potentially be before that.”

On December 14, 2006, councillors belonging to the ruling Non-Partisan Association voted to instruct the city's legal-services department to bring forward to council an amendment to the Solid Waste By-Law “to reflect locking of commercial waste containers”. Councillors belonging to Vision Vancouver and the Coalition of Progressive Electors all opposed the move.

“Right now, the city is not able to enforce that locking until the bylaw is enacted,” Heraty said.

In a staff report, the city's engineering services asked council last year to consider the option of ordering the locking of Dumpsters. It said that this was “for the purpose of providing staff the ability to enforce minimum standards of cleanliness for containers that are chronically overflowing and mismanaged, and to increase the safety and cleanliness of our streets and lanes”.

The report noted that each year, city sanitation crews pick up approximately 11,000 tons of litter and debris. It stated that almost half of this material, which accounts for almost 75 percent of the city's street-cleaning budget, “is the result of irresponsible behaviour from the public”.

The report also noted that approximately 15 percent of the street-cleaning budget, which stood at $7.5 million in 2006, goes to the Downtown Eastside, which also happens to be Fleury's neighbourhood.

“The four blocks boarding Columbia and East Hastings Streets, often considered the core of the DTES, experience some of the most profound and concentrated public disorder and street cleanliness problems in the City,” the report stated.

Dave Jones is the director of crime-prevention services of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association. As far as the DVBIA is concerned, it's past the idea of locking Dumpsters.

“We want to see them [Dumpsters] gone,” Jones told the Straight. The former Vancouver police inspector added that the DVBIA is developing a similar Dumpster-free approach to that in Kelowna and Seattle, Washington. In these cities, according to Jones, garbage is segregated and put into “presold bags”, which, in turn, are picked up regularly by disposal companies. The city staff report described this approach as a “pay-as-you-throw” system.

“We looked at the years and years of incredible mess and disorder and garbage and debris and mischief associated with Dumpsters,” Jones said. “We've looked at the processes in Seattle and Kelowna. Getting rid of Dumpsters seems to modify problem behaviour.”

Jones said his group may be able to submit data collected from its review of their area's garbage situation to city council by the end of February.

Ken Lyotier is the executive director and manager of United We Can, a recycling depot on East Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside. “We're not opposed to locking bins or getting rid of bins provided that we develop another strategy for people that are currently scavenging those bins for empties and other valuables,” he told the Straight. “My understanding is they [council] will delay that kind of a decision until they come up with an alternative.”

A former Dumpster diver himself, Lyotier said his group is “still working on an assessment of the binning community and those folks' needs, and until we get a clear picture of how they work and they fit into this, the rest of the process is not moving ahead”. He noted that some 650 to 700 people use the United We Can depot to trade in their bottles and cans.

There are approximately 2,600 Dumpsters on city streets, primarily in lanes, the city staff report noted. It also stated that in 2005, the Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services responded to 283 fires originating in commercial waste containers.

Chris Underwood is a solid-waste management engineer for the city who coauthored the staff report. “The intention is to focus the enforcement efforts on the problem bins,” he told the Straight. “It's not realistic to enforce such a bylaw citywide. The intention has always been…if a container is not being managed properly by the business and the hauler, then the city would have the ability to enforce them to keep the container locked so it's not overflowing and making a mess on public property.”

Michael Strutt, an industrial designer, is involved in a United We Can urban binning project. He has designed a folding cart that is lighter and makes less noise compared to the shopping carts used by many binners.

“If Dumpsters get locked down, I don't think the recyclables are going to be filtered out of the garbage stream, and they'll be going to the landfill,” Strutt told the Straight. “It's not just the bottles; there are a lot of things that people throw out that individuals use again to recycle, whether it's clothing or household items.”

Burnaby Coun. Nick Volkow told the Straight that his city doesn't have a garbage issue like that of Vancouver and that no one has come forward with a recommendation to lock Dumpsters there.

“I'm sympathetic with what Vancouver is trying to achieve, but there are some other issues too,” Volkow said. “There are people that do supplement their income by Dumpster diving. If these people aren't able to access Dumpsters, they'll probably start accessing parked cars.”

Kim Kerr, executive director of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, told the Straight that the push to get rid of Dumpsters is part of the “gentrification” of the city's poorest neighbourhood.

“I've yet to hear BIAs [business improvement associations] suggest that homeless people should be treated like human beings,” Kerr said. “These are people who've come to rent commercial space and develop businesses where rents are really cheap, and now that they're there, they want the poor who've lived in this neighbourhod for countless years to be driven out.”