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With just weeks to go before Toronto's new pay-as-you-throw garbage fee kicks in, city solid waste officials are facing up to the reality that the attempt to get new garbage containers to every household in the city won't happen by the Nov. 1 start date.

According to Geoff Rathbone, Toronto's General Manager of Solid Waste, about 75,000 homes across the city - a third of them in Etobicoke - won't have garbage containers by Nov. 1, and many won't have any until January or February 2009.

But that doesn't mean that the city will delay the imposition of the new garbage fees by November 1. Rathbone said the city will be mailing out special tags to homeowners, based on the size of bin they've selected, so they'll get the same level of service as those who've already got one of the four sizes of bins.

The bins range from a small one, big enough to hold just one garbage bag every two weeks and granting a $10 annual rebate on the water bill, to a large container holding 4 bags of garbage, costing $199 a year on the homeowner's water bill.

The tags sent out to homes without bins delivered will allow for the same amount of garbage.

"Those tags give them the equivalent volume that they would have had," said Rathbone. "So if somebody is using the medium bin, for example, that's the equivalent of three garbage tags a month. So we'll give people nine tags to take them through to the end of January."

By the end of January, the garbage bins should all be delivered - and once a bin is delivered, the tags will become void and Rathbone said most Torontonians will have the size of garbage bin they want.

That, he said, is the main reason for the delay. Rathbone said that initial attempts to contact homeowners and get them to select a bin size appropriate to their needs were less successful than the city hoped, with 30 per cent of homeowners not stating a preference.

Initially, city staff had intended to simply deliver a medium bin - which holds a bag and a half of garbage - to homes that hadn't stated a preference. But staff estimated the cost of swapping bins for those homeowners that couldn't use the medium bin would top $1 million.

So the city is working to contact those 50,000 homeowners.

The problem is somewhat different for about 25,000 homes in Etobicoke who ordered their medium-sized garbage bins. In that case, staff had under-estimated the demand for medium bins, and haven't been able to manufacture enough to cover the orders in Etobicoke.

Rathbone said those will likely be distributed by the end of November.