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The next step in the long march toward 70 per cent diversion of waste from landfill will begin later this month. It bears watching.

Starting in Scarborough and moving steadily westward, homeowners will be asked to think to the year ahead and imagine just how much garbage - not recycling, not composting, but old-fashioned garbage - they think they'll be tossing out every two weeks.

It's a similar projection that those homeowners made earlier this year when the city's solid waste department sent around a questionnaire asking what size of recycling bin they'd like. But that question amounted to one of aesthetics and practicality - recycling collection is free of any user fees so it's just a case of matching how many pop bottles and newspapers go out of the household and how big a bin will fit on the household's front porch.

There's more at stake in this projection, because this time, there's money involved.

The city needs money - millions of dollars, ostensibly to help finance the expansion of green bin and recycling programs to apartment dwellers. And homeowners will be on the hook for that money - as much as $190 a year, if they go for the largest garbage bin.

Of course, that bin is quite large. It holds the equivalent of 4.5 regular bags of garbage, to be collected every two weeks.

The smallest bin, however, is quite small indeed. It only holds the equivalent of a single bag of garbage and could almost (but not quite) fit under a kitchen counter. Choosing that bin saves the frugal homeowner $10 a year, in the form of a rebate. City staff are not - understandably, given the financial situation - going out of their way to encourage the good people of Scarborough to go for the smallest of the bins, but rather asking people to be "realistic" in the amount of garbage they're likely to toss out.

Small bins, we're told, are really only feasible for single people, or those who recycle aggressively. Everyone else should get a bigger bin of the appropriate size.

There's a certain logic to this from the city's point of view. If there's to be any revenue at all from this user-pay system, people will actually have to pay it. And that means throwing out a certain amount of garbage.

And that is where the logic from the environmental perspective breaks down. And as a columnist who admittedly does not have to figure out how to pay for all that apartment recycling, I'd like to offer up a different strategy.

When the mailer shows up asking you to realistically estimate how much garbage you're going to throw out every other week - don't be a baby. Make a plan to divert all that paper, all those containers, all those bottles from your garbage and into your unattractively large new recycling bin. Share it with your children, if you've got them. If they start to whine about it, turn the lights on and off again really quickly, remind them how much fun you had sitting in the dark for that one Earth Hour last weekend and wonder if they wouldn't like to do something of more lasting environmental value.

And while they're still confused, tick the bubble next to the smallest garbage container and mail in the card.

What's the worst that can happen? Maybe you all fail miserably at your attempt to recycle and compost your way out of a landfill and you have to pay $20 ($10 if you do it in the first three months) to upgrade to a larger garbage container. Maybe your kids think you're an idiot.

Best case? Maybe you have that $10 in your pocket year after year and you've actually moved to the forefront of waste diversion in the city. Maybe the promised inclusion of styrofoam and thin-film plastic in the recycling stream will bear fruit and there won't be anything but used razors and Q-Tips in the garbage anyway.

And maybe you can then be smug with the knowledge that you've done so in a system of diversion that's otherwise compromised by a need to raise cash and automate the city's waste collection process.