I’ve never been the most loyal advocate of Toronto’s numerous recycling programs, or of recycling in general; invariably, an empty can of tuna will find sanctuary in my garbage can, or a newspaper in a big black bag. But when Toronto unveiled its glorious Green Bin program last week I was excited: I opened the container, found my little plastic bin, and started filling the fellow with numerous organic scraps and the plethora of poop that somehow always far exceeds the amount of food I give my dog.

Unfortunately, October 18 having arrived on my calendar, I was disappointed that of the four in the converted house I call home, my apartment was the lone participant in the program.

For the same reason that I contended with the Grey and Blue Bin programs of yesteryear, as a result of the number of unrecyclable materials I continually faced that ended up going off with my bottles and cans, I was plagued with self-doubt. The situation wasn’t helped by Toronto Star columnist Royson James’s decree that this “waste could easily be kept [in Toronto] and turned into super soil.” James, throughout his piece “Trash talking makes city green,” hails our new Green Bin program as the highest point of waste management in recent memory. But “super soil?” Last time I checked, chicken bones and baby diapers teeming with fæces don’t make a god-sent compost, they make an e-coli-ridden mass of liquid putrefaction. Further, I find it hard to believe that all of those delicious little nuggets from bacteria-ridden diapers are going to be harvested from their cushy Pampers Home© before they end up in the soil.

As the ostensible vanguard of misinformation, James is a formidable character. As a lobbyist for all things green, he’s lacking to say the least. To say Toronto has moved ahead leaps and bounds is to ignore the decade and a half of stagnation between 1988’s introduction of the blue bin and this week’s movement towards organic waste management.

Even if the city contends that, unlike household composters, the organic waste will be ‘cooked’ and supplied with ample oxygen to create clean, safe converted poop-I mean, compost-I’m pretty sure the intentional blending of my neighbour’s fæces into my herb garden is a long shot.

I’m not writing off the Green Bin program (yet), but success will entail both Toronto’s citizens’ willingness to participate and the surety of the old Midas touch to turn poop into green gold. Even if Toronto claims that the compliance rate of Scarborough and Etobicoke tenants is over ninety per cent, there are no guarantees that these people are separating a substantial percentage of their organics from their waste.

Case in point: just yesterday I arrived home to the incontrovertible evidence of either people’s stupidity or disdain to participate. I discovered my green bin filled with the discarded coffee cups of the house painters my landlord had employed. Infuriated, I fell to the ground and, not knowing what else to say, I screamed (ostensibly to no one) “Soylent green is not coffee cups, it’s fæces!”