Toronto is home to 4.3 million people.

It's a big city with a big problem.. what to do with all the things those millions of people throw out every day  

" In general terms, we're talking about a million tons of product.." 

And that product.. is garbage.

Richard butts is the man in charge of getting rid of it.

On a tour of one of the city's seven waste transfer stations.. he tells us Toronto is a city that's cleaning up it's act thanks to agressive recycling and diversion. All of this tin and plastic also helps fill city coffers to the tune of 20 million dollars a year.  

" We really have a broad recycling program which includes the traditional blue-and-grey box prgram.. so paper and containers are out. We also have a pretty vibrant green box program that diverts over 100-thousand tons of organic materials, so things like table scraps, meat kitty litter.. and we also have a yard waste program.. there's another 100-thousand tons." 

In other words.. the city is on track to hit a landfill diversion rate of about 60 per cent this year when it comes to single-family homes... Compare that to London at 42 per cent..

With weekly pickups of compost and recyclables...And garbage pickup every two weeks... The idea is to get torontonians to keep as much out of the trash as possible. 

But even with diversion.. it's still likely that in the order of 600-thousand tons of garbage a year will be disposed of in Elgin county beginning in 2011.

That will be enough to fill about 80 of these garbage trucks a day.. 

 Self-proclaimed life-long environmentalists, Lillian and Vern Edquist, think Toronto's trash should be it's own problem... and not bound for some other community..like ours.

 Vern says,  " I feel bad for you.. I really do. I mean I'm from Toronto and I'm almost ashamed to say so.."

The reason the London area is about to become the new home for Toronto trash is pretty simple: Michigan is fed up.

Some of the people in Sumpter Township, nestled in the western corner of Wayne County about 30 minutes from Detroit, can't wait for the flow of trash to stop.

Others, however, wonder what's in store for the community once it does.

Loretta Wilson lives next door to Carlton Farms, one of the largest landfills in North America.

She says she and her husband moved to the location more than a decade ago after being told the modest-sized landfill wiould soon close.

However, it was given permission to grow instead, to the point that, in 2003, it took in 1.25 million tonnes of garbage from Toronto alone.

Brad Guiilder of the Ecology Center which has been fighting the flow of Canadian trash into Michigan for years, says all the trucks have caused may hazards, including the near death of a woman whose vehicle was hit by two garbage trucks.

He says the 786 thousand tons of Toronto trash that came to Michigan last year, 86 tractor-trailer loads every day, supplied up to 80 percent of all the garbage going into the dump.

The Supervisor of Sumpter Township, however, is worried how he'll pay for services and new infrastructure if the door is closed to Toronto's garbage.

At one time, royalties from Carlton Farms made up 65 pecent of the township's revenues. It's not that high now, but still 2 or 3 million  U.S dollars a year.

Supervisor Johnny Vawters says if the community can't attract new business it may be forced to ask for emergency aid from the state and federal governments.