Peter Boychuk, who was a technical engineer with the Province of Manitoba from 1959 until his retirement in 1987, designed many highway signs throughout Manitoba. His most notable contribution was the design used for the Province's Trash into Orbit Project – a highway litter receptacle that is still a unique Manitoba icon for many.James Rewucki
“It just came,” Peter Boychuk would remember. He had been a civil servant then, working with the department of highways in Manitoba. It was the early 1960s, and although his assignment was rooted very firmly on the ground, Mr. Boychuk was thinking about space, about rockets and Sputnik and men walking on the moon.
His pencil traced a circle on the page.
“A circle developed into another circle, and another circle,” he would say, describing the moment many years later. “And it developed into the Orbit.”
What Mr. Boychuk created that day would become a fixture of the Manitoba landscape for decades – a highlight of prairie roadtrips, an icon of design, and a source of excitement and imagining and deep nostalgia for a generation.
It was also, arguably, Canada’s most beloved and interesting trash bin.
Peter Boychuk was born in Winnipeg on July 6, 1931, the second child of Ukrainian immigrants. His father, Peter Bohajczuk, died shortly before his birth. His mother, Ecaterina, didn’t speak English and supported her children plucking chickens.
Mr. Boychuk quit school at a young age to help support his mother and two sisters, and in his early adult years shovelled coal and worked as a railroad fireman with the Canadian Pacific Railway. He started working with the Province of Manitoba in the late 1950s, first as a draftsman and then a technical engineer with the highways department.
Inventive and artistic, Mr. Boychuk’s work included the creation of monuments welcoming travellers along the province’s east and west borders, the development of a trolley to store equipment at highway construction sites, and the design of numerous highway signs that remain in use today. He was particularly concerned with signs that could enhance worker safety along the road, and also developed highway signage that didn’t require words, because he knew not all travellers could read English. He worked on complex traffic planning for the visits of both Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth to the province. Outside work, he built a cabin, restored a wooden sailboat, painted pictures, and propagated tomatoes and geraniums. After his retirement in 1987, Mr. Boychuk and his wife, Grace, started a successful hobby business making and selling wooden cake pans.
But the thing for which Mr. Boychuk would become most known began in the early 1960s, when he was tasked by his boss with creating a roadside trash bin to address the growing issue of litter on the province’s highways.
He came up with three designs. One was a traditional garbage can, another a fish with its mouth wide open. The third, his favourite, was the Orbit.
Originally called the Litter Sphere, the Orbit was four-feet in diameter, a perfectly round ball composed of two hemispheres of ivory-coloured, fire-resistant fibreglass. There was a large circular opening at the top, and the ball sat on heavy steel hairpin legs that recalled the base of a satellite, and could be bolted into concrete to prevent theft.
The province unveiled the first 10 cans in June 1965, with highways minister Walter Weir introducing them as “an imaginative new approach” to highway litter, which would “encourage motorists to toss ‘trash into Orbit’ instead of onto the highway.”
A car drives up to one of Manitoba's iconic Orbit highway trash receptacles. They were a fixture of the province's landscape for decades.Frank Chalmers/The University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Winnipeg Tribune Photograph Collection
There were dispensers of small trash bags at each Orbit site, and upcoming Orbits were heralded with “countdown signs” along the highway as motorists got close.
“As a kid, that was the big highlight,” CBC radio host Marcy Markusa remembered, in a radio interview with Mr. Boychuk in 2015. “You’d be like, ‘10 minutes to Orbit!’ You’d count it down from the backseat. It was like the launch of a spaceship.”
The Orbits cut a striking figure on the Manitoba landscape, so starkly ethereal against the vast prairie fields and sky that it was almost like they were, in fact, from space.
Mr. Boychuk’s youngest daughter, Jackie Walton, remembers the excitement of cruising up to Orbits with her father, on their way to the cabin in the family’s 1967 Plymouth Fury. She says Mr. Boychuk would often pull over to take a look at his design.
At their height, there were 125 Orbits across the province. As one 1974 news story noted, the program was more successful than anyone could have imagined. People stopped and had their pictures taken with Orbits, and travellers sent letters from around the world expressing their admiration for the program.
But the Orbits’ success was also their downfall.
The bins were so well-known and so well-used that people began using Orbits to deposit not only the light trash for which they were intended, but large amounts of household and camping garbage like mattresses, roadkill, and even a wood stove. One 1969 photograph, by Winnipeg Tribune photographer Frank Chalmers, showed an arm reaching out of an Orbit’s hole, capturing “a hitchhiking hippie using the Sputnik-styled orbit as a shelter.” Highway maintenance workers had stories of finding deer heads and duck feathers, live skunks, even a litter of piglets.
“It got out of hand,” Mr. Boychuk said, during the 2015 radio interview. “People were putting their garbage out. The highways [department] is not meant for garbage collection. They’re not garbage collectors.”
The province phased out the program in the 1980s, and the Orbits were officially decommissioned in June 1997, exactly 32 years after their launch. When Mr. Boychuk retired, they gave him an Orbit.
Ms. Walton and Gwen Gill say they didn’t realize for a long time there was so much nostalgia about their father’s design, which now appears on T-shirts made by one Manitoba company, and was the subject of the 2012 documentary, Where Have All the Orbits Gone?
Filmmaker James Rewucki says he had long thought about making a film about the roadside trash cans that so captured his imagination as a kid, and came to be such an important part of the province in the 1960s and ‘70s.
“It’s kind of silly, but it’s pretty telling how important design is, right?” Mr. Rewucki says. “Nobody remembers a regular brown garbage can at the side of the road. But everybody remembers the Orbits.”
Mr. Boychuk died on March 11 from complications related to dementia and pneumonia. He was 91. He was predeceased by his wife, Grace. He leaves his children, Susan Harris, Ms. Gill, Carl Boychuk and Ms. Walton, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.