It was the late 1970s, and Mr. Lyotier was one of many broken men living in a neighbourhood marked by poverty and hardship. A friend had taken him for his first soup-kitchen visit, which he recalled years later in a CBC Ideas episode as a grim, shoulder-to-shoulder experience of eating soup out of repurposed plastic margarine containers amid the poorest people he had ever encountered.
“It was a very uncomfortable experience to be that close,” Mr. Lyotier remembered in the 2005 episode. “But as I was chewing on a crust of bread, I started to get high. It was like a psychedelic experience. Maybe for the first time in my adult life, I felt like I had a place where I belonged.
“God, I was so hungry for that. It’s probably what real communion is like – here we all were, eating together, just people being people.”
That sense of community would drive so much of what Mr. Lyotier went on to accomplish. His efforts over the next decades would win him international recognition, and lead change on social and environmental fronts that few people were contemplating until Mr. Lyotier got the conversation going.
“I don’t think you could look back at any of the current day’s zero-waste policies without finding the influence of Ken,” public policy strategist Michael Magee says. “Ken was the original ‘green jobs’ guy.”
And it all began with dumpster-diving.
Kenneth Hugh Lyotier was born Feb. 7, 1947. He grew up in North Vancouver with brothers John, Keith and cousin Marcia Craig, who moved in with the family after her parents died. Until developing Crohn’s disease at 17, Mr. Lyotier was on track for a typical life trajectory of university, a decent job, a family.
But the chronic pain and intestinal agony that are hallmarks of Crohn’s changed everything.
“I spent a lot of time in hospitals, and was really sick for a lot of years,” Mr. Lyotier said in the Ideas episode. “I also learned there were things that could distract me from the pain: alcohol and drugs.”
Mr. Lyotier worked when he could during those years, but his pain – and then his addictions – complicated things. He was soon living an impoverished life on income assistance in the Downtown Eastside, and took up dumpster-diving to fill time and add to his sparse income.
“It’s amazing how much stuff people throw away,” Mr. Lyotier noted in his 2005 interview. “We’re an incredibly addictive society all the way round. We squander so much, consume so much. It’s like this never-ending hole that we’re trying to fill up, and it’s not all that different than the hole in somebody’s arm.”
Mr. Lyotier was almost 40 before he agreed to undergo surgery to remove part of his damaged intestine. The surgery dramatically reduced his chronic pain. For the first time in his adult life, he saw a life beyond daily survival.
He sobered up. He found stable housing. His soup-kitchen revelation was years behind him at that point, but he hadn’t forgotten it. He didn’t yet know where it was leading him, but knew it would involve the people of the Downtown Eastside.
There was much shame to dumpster-diving back then for the unemployed and injured resource industry workers who accounted for much of that neighbourhood’s population. But Mr. Lyotier saw the work ethic that drove these “binners.”
He believed that organizing them could bring more respect to the work, and perhaps convince the province to expand the bottle-deposit system to more types of beverage containers. As a binner himself, he dreamed of an alternative to the humiliating daily experience of trying to get judgmental store owners to accept binners’ bottles and cans for refund.
But his binner colleagues were reluctant to give up time on their “trap lines” to attend a meeting. Long-time friend Patsy George recalls encouraging Mr. Lyotier to reach out to government or a local church for a small grant to test his theory.
So he did. He got $1,500 to organize a one-day bottle depot in the fall of 1991 at Vancouver’s Victory Square. Binners were invited to pile their carts with beverage containers that at the time weren’t refundable and take them to the square, where they were paid $10 a load.
The mountain of containers got the attention of media and government alike (though most of the $1,500 went toward hiring a truck to take it all away). The visuals of all those drink containers destined for the landfill planted the seed for the universal beverage deposit system that British Columbia put in place seven years later.
“It was Ken helping to push the province to put deposits on all these items, because binners could then go and source this ‘gold’ in garbage cans,” says Sean Condon, managing director of the Vancity Community Foundation project 312 Main, who first met Mr. Lyotier as a journalist. “How many tonnes of waste have been diverted from the landfill because of Ken’s work?”
Mr. Lyotier’s signature achievement was his social enterprise United We Can, which opened in 1995 in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.
Finally, binners had a place to call their own. They found economic opportunity and community in the welcoming space. There were jobs and training for those able to work, no daily limit on how many containers they could bring in, and nobody judging them.
That enterprise has now grown into a diverse recycling business run out of a 2,300-square-metre building that is three times the size of the original site. It processes an average 60,000 containers a day, employs 120 people, and refunds $2-million a year in deposits to about 700 binners.
“What Ken did with the binners was remarkable,” former MP Libby Davies says. “He realized something so important that beats back on that terrible stigma that says that if you’re poor, you must be lazy and stupid. Ken knew that there was this entrepreneurial spirit in the Downtown Eastside, a great work ethic.”
Mr. Lyotier followed up United We Can with the Binners Project in 2016, continuing his efforts to bring respect and dignity to the work. That year, binners were hired as “zero-waste ambassadors” for Vancouver’s annual Pacific National Exhibition.
“He was a bridge builder. I don’t know very many people who could navigate that many levels of bureaucracy,” says Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan, a friend of Mr. Lyotier’s since meeting him in the early 1990s when she was a community legal advocate in the Downtown Eastside.
Mr. Lyotier’s hard work didn’t go unrecognized in his lifetime. He received Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal in 2005, and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. The City of Vancouver gave him a Civic Merit award. He was a torchbearer ahead of Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Games. (And brought the torch into United We Can the next day so binners could get their photos taken with it.)
He travelled with the City of Vancouver contingent to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. He and University of Victoria geographer and waste-picker researcher Jutta Gutberlet went to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2008 for the Waste and Citizenship Festival. Royal Roads University professor Ann Dale enlisted him as a co-researcher for projects on social capital and agency. The University of British Columbia gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 2011.
But Mr. Lyotier’s most powerful impact was on the lives of the binners and inner-city residents whom he tirelessly championed.
“While Ken’s list of life accomplishments will be cherished and celebrated in many circles, I will simply reflect for now on his personal impact on my life,” friend and neighbour Mikeal Frazer wrote. “Ken really showed me that it is easy to love, and that it is also all too easy for us to forget that love when we are judging others.”
Mr. Lyotier and his brother John lost touch with each other for many years, but reconnected 20 years ago. “I remember thinking here’s my little brother, sober and doing wonderful things,” John says. “I’ve been packing up his possessions this week, and one thing I’ve learned doing that is that he was so loved.” (His other brother, Keith, died in 2007.)
Mr. Lyotier always wanted people to understand that binning was a real job. The $170,000 in savings he had accumulated when he received his cancer diagnosis in September proves his point. “All from bottles and cans!” marvels United We Can board member and former Tourism Vancouver head Geoffrey Howes.
Those savings have launched a new Vancity Community Foundation fund in Lyotier’s name to continue his work in the Downtown Eastside. “It’s classic Ken to do that,” says Mr. Howes, one of eight friends who Mr. Lyotier hand-picked to administer the fund.
The group got in one meeting with Mr. Lyotier before his medically assisted death on Nov. 27. The meeting turned into a living wake as each person shared memories with the soft-spoken binner and community organizer.
“What drives the advisory group in the best of ways is that we’re really determined to create a legacy in Ken’s name,” Mr. Howes says. “He needs to be known and remembered for what he did.”
Published in The Globe and Mail on Dec. 20, 2021
He sobered up. He found stable housing. His soup-kitchen revelation was years behind him at that point, but he hadn’t forgotten it. He didn’t yet know where it was leading him, but knew it would involve the people of the Downtown Eastside.
There was much shame to dumpster-diving back then for the unemployed and injured resource industry workers who accounted for much of that neighbourhood’s population. But Mr. Lyotier saw the work ethic that drove these “binners.”
He believed that organizing them could bring more respect to the work, and perhaps convince the province to expand the bottle-deposit system to more types of beverage containers. As a binner himself, he dreamed of an alternative to the humiliating daily experience of trying to get judgmental store owners to accept binners’ bottles and cans for refund.
But his binner colleagues were reluctant to give up time on their “trap lines” to attend a meeting. Long-time friend Patsy George recalls encouraging Mr. Lyotier to reach out to government or a local church for a small grant to test his theory.
So he did. He got $1,500 to organize a one-day bottle depot in the fall of 1991 at Vancouver’s Victory Square. Binners were invited to pile their carts with beverage containers that at the time weren’t refundable and take them to the square, where they were paid $10 a load.
The mountain of containers got the attention of media and government alike (though most of the $1,500 went toward hiring a truck to take it all away). The visuals of all those drink containers destined for the landfill planted the seed for the universal beverage deposit system that British Columbia put in place seven years later.
“It was Ken helping to push the province to put deposits on all these items, because binners could then go and source this ‘gold’ in garbage cans,” says Sean Condon, managing director of the Vancity Community Foundation project 312 Main, who first met Mr. Lyotier as a journalist. “How many tonnes of waste have been diverted from the landfill because of Ken’s work?”
Mr. Lyotier’s signature achievement was his social enterprise United We Can, which opened in 1995 in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.
Finally, binners had a place to call their own. They found economic opportunity and community in the welcoming space. There were jobs and training for those able to work, no daily limit on how many containers they could bring in, and nobody judging them.
That enterprise has now grown into a diverse recycling business run out of a 2,300-square-metre building that is three times the size of the original site. It processes an average 60,000 containers a day, employs 120 people, and refunds $2-million a year in deposits to about 700 binners.
“What Ken did with the binners was remarkable,” former MP Libby Davies says. “He realized something so important that beats back on that terrible stigma that says that if you’re poor, you must be lazy and stupid. Ken knew that there was this entrepreneurial spirit in the Downtown Eastside, a great work ethic.”
Mr. Lyotier followed up United We Can with the Binners Project in 2016, continuing his efforts to bring respect and dignity to the work. That year, binners were hired as “zero-waste ambassadors” for Vancouver’s annual Pacific National Exhibition.
“He was a bridge builder. I don’t know very many people who could navigate that many levels of bureaucracy,” says Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan, a friend of Mr. Lyotier’s since meeting him in the early 1990s when she was a community legal advocate in the Downtown Eastside.
Mr. Lyotier’s hard work didn’t go unrecognized in his lifetime. He received Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal in 2005, and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. The City of Vancouver gave him a Civic Merit award. He was a torchbearer ahead of Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Games. (And brought the torch into United We Can the next day so binners could get their photos taken with it.)
He travelled with the City of Vancouver contingent to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. He and University of Victoria geographer and waste-picker researcher Jutta Gutberlet went to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2008 for the Waste and Citizenship Festival. Royal Roads University professor Ann Dale enlisted him as a co-researcher for projects on social capital and agency. The University of British Columbia gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 2011.
But Mr. Lyotier’s most powerful impact was on the lives of the binners and inner-city residents whom he tirelessly championed.
“While Ken’s list of life accomplishments will be cherished and celebrated in many circles, I will simply reflect for now on his personal impact on my life,” friend and neighbour Mikeal Frazer wrote. “Ken really showed me that it is easy to love, and that it is also all too easy for us to forget that love when we are judging others.”
Mr. Lyotier and his brother John lost touch with each other for many years, but reconnected 20 years ago. “I remember thinking here’s my little brother, sober and doing wonderful things,” John says. “I’ve been packing up his possessions this week, and one thing I’ve learned doing that is that he was so loved.” (His other brother, Keith, died in 2007.)
Mr. Lyotier always wanted people to understand that binning was a real job. The $170,000 in savings he had accumulated when he received his cancer diagnosis in September proves his point. “All from bottles and cans!” marvels United We Can board member and former Tourism Vancouver head Geoffrey Howes.
Those savings have launched a new Vancity Community Foundation fund in Lyotier’s name to continue his work in the Downtown Eastside. “It’s classic Ken to do that,” says Mr. Howes, one of eight friends who Mr. Lyotier hand-picked to administer the fund.
The group got in one meeting with Mr. Lyotier before his medically assisted death on Nov. 27. The meeting turned into a living wake as each person shared memories with the soft-spoken binner and community organizer.
“What drives the advisory group in the best of ways is that we’re really determined to create a legacy in Ken’s name,” Mr. Howes says. “He needs to be known and remembered for what he did.”
Published in The Globe and Mail on Dec. 20, 2021