Visitors to Toronto are invariably charmed by how clean it appears. Except for the construction dust that can blow like a desert storm on a moment's notice, the city looks as well swept as a hotel room. You'd never know Canada's biggest metropolis has a rubbish crisis.
Almost every day, for eight years now, as many as 350 articulated lorries full of (mostly) Toronto's rubbish lumber southwest for six hours or so to landfills in the United States. The Americans are tired of this, and who can blame them? One Michigan dump alone last year handled enough Canadian refuse to fill 1,000 football fields with rubbish about a metre high.
Toronto's other dirty little secret is that it has just bought its very own rubbish dump. The deal, negotiated in private just before the recent municipal elections, is set to close in the next few weeks. Most big cities don't own their own dumps. (Better to have middlemen for, sniff, that kind of thing.) But Toronto Mayor David Miller, who prides himself as a greenie - some of his best friends are environmentalists - is as pleased as punch by the purchase.
If nothing else, it allowed him to skate through his re-election last week without having to confront the growing incineration lobby that wants to turn Toronto's mountains of rubbish into electricity. Mr Miller is dead set against rubbish incineration - even though the process is light-years from the old fly-ash-spewing days, and is mainstream practice in European and Asian cities.
Mr Miller is a recycling guy through and through, as are virtually all the environmental groups that back him. For them, incineration has potential health problems. But more than that, it would signify the end of the recycling dream: people wouldn't bother thinking about a useful second life for their rubbish if they knew it was just going to be burned.
Toronto, it should be said, is a great recycling city. Every week, hundreds of thousands of homeowners dutifully move some combination of their four different-coloured boxes to the curb.