Grassroots group urges Tim Hortons to put a lid on litter

Irene Vandertop pulls out three clear plastic bags of garbage from the back of her car. The garbage, all 3,000 pieces of it, was collected by volunteers from an area outside just one Tim Hortons store in Toronto over several hours.

"This is quite disgusting," Vandertop says before she pulls out the third bag. "This is only cups and lids from one store."

Vandertop, a co-founder of Don't Mess with the Don, says the restaurant chain Tim Hortons has a big problem when it comes to litter. The registered charity, run by volunteers, cleans up trash from ravines in the Don Valley and says it has picked up about 136,078 kilograms of garbage in the past six years.

The number one brand it finds in its garbage cleanups is Tim Hortons, Vandertop said.

"Imagine — Tim Hortons has more than 4,000 stores across Canada now and that would be millions and millions of cups and lids all strewn out throughout our parks, streets, wild spaces. And this is only cups and lids. There's also food wrappers, containers and other beverage containers," she said.

"I think Tim Hortons, as a flagship Canadian company, has a tremendous opportunity here to do something good for the world and for the environment that we live in. This is not in line with the times."

The charity launched its campaign, Tim Let's Talk, last month, because Vandertop says the organization would like the restaurant chain to take more responsibility for its litter including carrying out clean-ups, encouraging customers to bring reusable cups and educating staff and customers about preventing litter. The trash pollutes green spaces, which means wildlife have to "live amidst our garbage," she said.

Vandertop says Don't Mess with the Don wrote a letter to Tim Hortons executives and hand-delivered it to company headquarters in May 2023 and again June 2023. It also made phone calls, but received no response. On June 21 this year, the group published the letter online, and launched its campaign three days later.

On Tuesday, Tim Hortons's director of sustainability and packaging reached out to the group.

In a statement this week, the company said it is committed to helping communities through "more sustainable packaging and recycling practices" and through its sustainability platform Tims for Good, which launched in 2021. 

"Tim Hortons has a dedicated sustainability team that has spent the last several years charting a more sustainable path forward for our restaurants, along with our guests," Michael Oliveira, communications director for Tim Hortons, said in the statement. Oliveira added that the company invested in a national TV campaign "to highlight our sustainability goals with guests."

Through Tims for Good, the company has pledged to change more than three billion units of packaging to make them reusable, recyclable, or compostable. The company also claims it eliminated the use of more than one billion single-use plastics, including plastic straws and plastic stir sticks, by 2021.

On its website, the company says it is working to improve its packaging by: "transitioning from single-use to reusable; reducing the amount of material used; and ensuring our products can be diverted from landfills through recycling or composting."

According to the company, there are plans for its cups to be collected for recycling across Ontario by 2026. It says it is "encouraged" that, through Ontario's new extended producer responsibility regulations, an expected 17,000 new public collection bins will be installed across the province to enable people to dispose of waste properly.