Last week, Michigan legislators passed a motion that would ban all imported garbage, pending the approval of Congress.

The “garbage train” that saw hundreds of containers of our city’s trash sent south every year is about to be halted. In short, for the first time in a long time Toronto will have to clean up its own mess.

How dare Michigan lawmakers refuse our refuse, you say? Well, would you want a steady stream of their waste trucked into our province every day? Michigan has taken a proactive step in reducing the health hazards to its citizens posed by this distasteful import, and now it’s our turn to quit paying lip service to the idea of waste reduction and actually make it happen.

According to the city’s website, Toronto has been hard at work since amalgamation looking for a “made in Toronto solution” to our garbage woes. Now that “ship it to the States” is no longer option number one, we need better ways to encourage recycling, reducing, and reusing.

Recycling has happily caught on across the board; the majority of households recycle as a matter of course, while corporate and public buildings have made great strides in enabling recycling on-site.

Where we’re lagging is in the other two Rs. We don’t often challenge the “bubble-wrap or bust” culture that generates so much excess packaging. Many common items we use and discard (plastic cups and cellophane wrap come to mind) have nowhere to go but the landfill-more intelligent choices on our part would help this situation.

Refocusing our efforts on reusing would not only ease our garbage woes, but would also help avoid the power shortages and smog days that everyone hates but no one wants to do anything about.

Toronto has an annual “Litter Audit” that aims to reduce litter by 50% between 2002 and 2007. At the end of 2005, the city reported that we had so far reduced litter by 20%, which is commendable but not exactly encouraging in light of this latest development.

Despite these targets, the city has taken a soft approach to waste reduction, encouraging individual efforts to reduce at the micro level while employing the “out of sight, out of mind” policy when it came to the big stuff. Now more than ever, measures to ensure greater waste reduction are sorely needed, whether through greater public awareness campaigns or legislative measures like the proposed surcharge on each garbage bag over a certain number per household.

The green bin program that turns organic waste into compost has been a great success in Etobicoke and Scarborough; citizens of these former boroughs now enthusiastically use this effective method of waste diversion. It is high time that the whole city gets in on the action.

If environmental degradation doesn’t tug at your heartstrings, remember that it costs far less to implement programs like the green bin than it does to deal with our current trash problem.

The green bin program would especially help students living in downtown apartments who could have their organic waste picked up twice as often as normal refuse, as is done in the suburbs.

The time for trash-talking is over. Now is the time for creative solutions that actually stick, since there are only so many places where a mountain made out of garbage (as can be found in Etobicoke’s Centennial Park) won’t look out of place.