Biweekly trash pickup blamed for rats
Some Hochelaga-Maisonneuve residents are blaming biweekly garbage collection for the growing numbers of rats in their borough.
-
Kate
Reply
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Joey on Line-by-line guide to bus changes
- Joey on Rents have risen 70% in ten years
- vasi on Line-by-line guide to bus changes
- Kate on Notes for the long May weekend
- Mozai on Notes for the long May weekend
- Chris on REM passengers sent to the train wash
- DeWolf on The crisis in Milton Park
Pages
Other levels of gov’t
Sideblog projects
Enviro Montreal is a Bluesky feed that follows local environment news. Also available on Mastodon.
Archives
Pages rescued from montreal.com
Meta
Nicholas 13:18 on 2025-05-15 Permalink
I’m going to blame people putting food/organic material, which you are not legally allowed to put in your garbage, into their garbage, collected biweekly in bags, rather than their compost, which is collected weekly in locking bins.
Also the pest control specialist blames restaurants, which do not get biweekly garbage pickup but pay for commercial pickup, so are unaffected by any changes in residential pickup.
DeWolf 13:29 on 2025-05-15 Permalink
I have neighbours who absolutely refuse to compost and who pile all their food waste into big black bags that invariably get ripped open by rodents. Then they have the gall to blame the resulting mess on the compost bins.
Joey 14:19 on 2025-05-15 Permalink
I suspect you are both right about what’s happening in Hochelaga – plus the fact that garbage put out whenever by people who ignore the garbage pickup windows (who, presumably, are more likely to be tossing organic material given their general disregard for the rules) winds up sitting on the sidewalk a lot longer. That being said, it’s really, really unfair to the rule-abiding citizens of MHM to have to put up with a rat infestation that they are in no way responsible for. It seems pretty evident that this problem only arose after the change in garbage pickup schedule, even if lots of people weren’t disposing of their waste properly beforehand. Isn’t it wrong to allow this kind of vermin infestation to affect everyone in a neighbourhood because some people don’t know follow the rules? Presumably at some point public health officials will force the borough to change back…
(Note also that for most of the borough the new schedule was only implemented last November – things are not looking promising now that it’s hot out.)
(@DeWolf, it would be a shame if their garbage was returned to them, wouldn’t it?)
MarcG 14:46 on 2025-05-15 Permalink
When I see poorly done ‘garbaging’ I chalk it up to mental illness. I don’t think punishment/reward is going to be very effective here (if it ever is), and education seems an unlikely cure as well.
jeather 15:54 on 2025-05-15 Permalink
I don’t know what restaurants are supposed to do, but lots of cheap ones have piles of trash outside for more than enough time to get rats. Overflowing, opened dumpsters, or just piles in an alleyway.
Nicholas 19:20 on 2025-05-16 Permalink
There are lots of solutions, all around, cities all over the world have solved this problem, and regardless of frequency of pickup the solution is not to do what NYC does and pile bags of kitchen waste on the sidewalk.
For restaurants, you can lock your dumpster. You can form a tight enough seal, not just to prevent humans from getting in or opening the lid, but rats too. You can also get your garbage picked up more frequently. You can join together with other businesses near you to get enough garbage and kitchen waste in a block to have daily pickup of the latter. The business associations, the SDCs, can help with all this, getting businesses to work together, which also improves the commercial corridor.
For homes, I’m sorry, but it’s time to take the kid gloves off. I remember having our garbage day change to kitchen waste over a decade and a half ago, and we had no rat problem. All boroughs have it now, with some not implemented for nine or more units, and most Montrealers have had it for years. Why is the rat problem so localized in this borough? We’ve had education, we’ve had news reports, you can’t not see the bins. It just takes a bit of habit changing, and some people need to be nudged into it. The great thing about the kitchen waste bin, unlike garbage bags, is it locks, keeping rats out, so you can put your waste in the bin literally at any time, any temperature, it’s fine, and then you set it out the right day.
I know it’s an election year so we won’t likely have sticks, but I hope next year, when every single residence on the island will be required to compost kitchen waste, that they do a final campaign to teach people what to do and alert people that fines are coming, and then they start fining people. We don’t expect people to leave dog or human shit on the street, and this is similarly dangerous to public health. We live in a society, we have these laws for good reasons, if people don’t want to follow the social contract and keep our city clean, we should fine them, and we should feel no compunction encouraging our neighbours in this way with carrots, and eventually with sticks.
MarcG 07:30 on 2025-05-17 Permalink
“The great thing about the kitchen waste bin, unlike garbage bags, is it locks, keeping rats out” – this is great in theory but if you walk down my block you’ll see that less than half of the brown bins still have their plastic orange locking mechanism on them.
CE 09:54 on 2025-05-17 Permalink
Also, after the contents of the bins have been dumped into the truck, they’re usually thrown back onto the sidewalk, often with the covers open with residue left in the bins. If I were a rat, I’d be going around to those open bins after pickup to enjoy the feast inside.