How Kingston Manufactures a Plastic Crisis to Fuel Stigma
By Melissa Reid — May 29, 2026
Walk into Belle Park on a hot day and you'll see an indefensible mountain of single-use plastic water bottles. To the average social media critic, this is proof of an "unruly encampment." They demand the camp be cleared. It's a convenient, tidy narrative — too bad it's completely manufactured by City Hall.
The Volunteer Logistics Loop
The city drops pallets of water at a hub on Montreal Street and refuses to move them further. Our volunteers act as the city's unpaid, uninsured logistics department, manually hauling 30 to 35 cases per delivery day for the roughly 115 people who rely on the Feed the People lunch program. This floods the park with over 77,000 plastic bottles every summer.
The physical toll is real. Our volunteers are burning out their bodies handling this delivery in the summer heat using their own vehicles, carrying unlimited personal legal liability without a corporate shield. Last summer, one of our volunteers even suffered a hernia during these rounds. Apparently, breaking the backs of your own citizens to avoid doing your job is just standard municipal operating procedure in Kingston.
The Convicted Polluter Points Fingers
City Hall's panic over park "cleanliness" is rich coming from a legally convicted polluter. In the late 90s, the city was convicted under the federal Fisheries Act for dumping toxic sludge from this exact site into the Cataraqui River (see: R. v. City of Kingston, 1998). Today, they have the audacity to blame the unhoused for a trash crisis the administration actively engineered.
The $21,000 Circular Joke
The math is embarrassing. The city spends $9,600 on single-use plastic bottles, then cuts checks to private industrial waste contractors for up to $12,000 over the summer just to haul that same plastic away. That's over $21,000 of public money burned to manufacture a crisis, worsen stigma, and line corporate pockets.
The Idle Asset
The solution is sitting in the city yard: a 1,400-litre Mobile Water Buggy. It costs $5.22 in raw water to fill.
Every day, the Feed the People program operates from 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM, including setup and takedown. If the city simply parked that trailer there for those three hours, the waste would drop to zero, the resource would be monitored by a city worker, and the physical liability for volunteers would vanish.
Deploying a unionized worker (CUPE Local 109) for that shift costs roughly $114/day. Total cost for the summer? $10,968.
The difference between a toxic, injurious, $21,000 plastic nightmare and a professional, insured municipal utility is only $1,340.
If you're angry about the state of Belle Park, don't blame the people trying to survive the heat or the volunteers straining their bodies to keep them alive. Blame the administrators choosing corporate waste over public infrastructure.
Clean water is a municipal utility, not a grassroots chore. Pull the Water Buggy out of the yard and do your job.
Reference Appendix
- Belle Park Landfill Conviction: R. v. City of Kingston, 1998 CanLII 15034 (ON CJ)
- Environmental Pollution Standards: Fisheries Act, R.S.C., 1985, c. F-14, s. 36(3)
- Municipal Equipment: Utilities Kingston — Water Trailer Service