This Headline has been Recycled: "Recycling Has to Grow"

NL has millions of pounds of renewable resources available to be recycled, reused, and eventually, resold. The province has made progress but there's much more to do.

The city of Calgary has had drop off bins throughout the city for years. You can take a few minute walk down the street with plastics, glass, or cans, and you will not only free up some space at home, but also at the landfills, for clean air, and your own lungs.

We are a resource rich province alright, a resource that is largely untapped. The St. John's web site has a section for free "white" bulk metals pickup - fridges, stoves, swing sets, etc. that's in the right direction. But we need to evolve more in the household recycling area, to increase pop bottles and cans recycling, and to include other types of bottles and cans.

Calgary appears to be set up to accommodate citizen recycling. Here's a pdf of Recycling Opportunities from Calgary's web site. Here's a snapshot: . Food containers have to be cleaned before they are dropped off for recycling, and it only makes sense. It's hard work to be sorting these items all day, let alone have to tolerate every foul food odor there is.

There is a huge potential for huge growth in recycling in St. John's and the province. There are a number of drop off depots getting around but it's not quite where we could be in terms of facilitating recycling and accommodating residents, even for recyclable items accepted now.

Just dropping off some newspapers, plastics, and pops cans to the Elizabeth Ave. depot reminds you of Tim Horton's success - re: the line ups are happening. The space inside the customer area quickly becomes a squatty 5 x 20 ft space, and people are backed up outside the door with bags of bottles, cans, juice packs, and whatever is acceptable. The people doing the sorting are kept quite busy, and seem to be doing a good job of sorting. But they need more space too. There really is a need for either a larger work and drop-off area, but preferably more locations, as there is only so much parking space at this location, and that becomes a potential problem.

Most people are working 9-5, and with work and family commitments, are not available to drop off containers. So there needs to be available hours to accommodate recycling. Most green depots around the province close between 4 - 5 pm.

Refunds are real for plastics and pop cans, and therefore a definite incentive. It is becoming common to see people driving to the depot towing trolleys loaded with large bags of recyclables. One person's renewable resources on Monday must easily have been worth $70-$80. We 100s of millions of plastic and aluminum containers in this province each year - permanently resource-based like other provinces.

Though a refund is real, it should not at all be the only incentive to make the effort to cut down on waste to the dump. Thinking of throwing out something useful, and which has value, is well, a waste.

Oh, can't forget paper. People do drop off paper, without refund, and we can now see the tip of that resource iceberg. In February NL Environment Minister Charlene Johnson announced $300,000 toward a recycled paper baling machine, located on Blackmarsh Rd. Good stuff, but there's plenty more paper work to do.

It's been said before, but no harm in recycling the idea. In fact, take a drive around the city while the tree limbs are bare, and the leaves have yet to hide the trash. St. John's is in fact not clean and beautiful, unless you think that the bags in the trees are pretty, this time of year. But the city could be clean and beautiful. There really needs to be more pride promoted in keeping our surroundings neat, everywhere in the province.

Imagine into the future when there are hardly any containers thrown out in the garbage. Then, imagine other items included. In South Korea, every straw, or coffee stirring stick is recycled. Now that's really into it.

Papa's gotta have a brand new bag

Starting June 1, 2009, Toronto shoppers will pay 5 cents for new plastic bags. That's a decision city council made last night in an effort to reduce the problem of plastics in the environment. The Star article did not say whether this applies to all retail stores or just grocery stores. "Retailers will be required to accept reusable bags or containers from shoppers starting next June."

Councillors also voted to force take-out restaurants to develop food containers made of recyclable plastic, as well as to ban bottled water from being sold in city buildings. It's good to know, but in a way, a bit hard to believe the recycled plastic use has not been enforced before.

Will the 5 cents per bag be enough disincentive for people to really make a switch to non-plastic bags? It does not seem like much to turn people away from continue using plastic bags. If plastic bags were viewed the same way that cigarettes are, and heftier surcharges are added, it would really turn people off. Then again, maybe people would be happy to pay 40 cents per bag, just to "give back to" grocery stores.

In the case of plastic bags people do not have to pay any price for a cleaner environment. Toronto appears to have taken a forward step in preserving our world, environment and atmosphere for future generations. It's also time our province took more measures to cut down on waste. Product replacement. Now there's an opportunity for some entrepreneurial bag makers, or sewing hobbyists to be creative... Sew B's is taken though, but now, to learn to sew.

Waste and Perception

Sensible ideas can sure take a long time to come to fruition. St. John's recycling appears to be in the right direction, starting with downtown and another neighbourhood, then spreading out later this year. Mount Pearl started it in 2005. Households could put their recyclables out in separate bags on garbage collection days. Lots of fuel for the recycling industry to grow. It's better late than never, but better earlier than later. Ideally, placing recycling bins in neighbourhoods, blocks, towns, communities, where people can even walk to drop of recyclables, is a big part of the wastage solution. Many currently drop of plastic bottles, aluminum cans, paper, cardboard to several drop of points in St. John's and Mount Pearl. However, it doesn't appear that most people do just yet. One problem is storage, these products take up lots of space. Another is the mindset of garbage disposal convenience, it's easier to simply trash it. This is list of some of Calgary's recycling depots.



Saving bottles, cans, and paper is a great way especially for kids to get some pocket money. If there is little room to save a lot, then those community or local bins should leave no excuse to waste this resource in the usual trash.

Society is saturated with conservation and environmental tips and it's not so unfashionable to save up the "garbage". Unfortunately, there is still much that is wasted by society in general, food, clothes, tin cans, other packaging, automobile parts, etc. Conserving, and hanging on to stuff was/is not fashionable because it still goes against the religiously consumer and tacit doctrine and expectation to purchase "new", and "improved" things, continuously. Part of the psyche may be that throwing used things out is equated with being well-off, i.e., not being so desperate to have to stretch the use of something, or hang on to items to earn a few ever so valuable dollars to get by. Some people do not necessarily think about wasting food, or whatever, as being wasteful, since they perceive not throwing things out as being cheap. Such a perception is helped when advertising is always promoting acquiring new things, and "not settling for less", to "Live richly" (CitiBank), "Making more possible" (ABN AMRO), or, "Just do it" (Nike - in other words, don't think for a second that the pair you bought four months ago is good enough, just buy these).

What will be a "good" problem is bins overflowing with bottles, or cans waiting to be picked up, rather than something like this.

As for food if it's not "recycled" at home, then some of it can be composted. It's not for everyone, and is a bit of extra effort, but maybe there needs to be more promotional nudging of the benefits of doing this. Seeing garbage bins overflowing each week and knowing that 80 - 90% or more can be recycled, reminds us that much more needs to be done. Opportunites to grow the recycling industry, clean up neighbourhoods, use home-made composting material, and simply cutting back on landfill, can be enhanced, if not, then what a waste.

Harper's Government Bamboozling Canadians: David Suzuki

Our federal government's blatantly obvious strategy is to bamboozle Canadians into thinking it's on the ball when it comes to the environment by presenting plans that have one flashy element, which everyone remembers, and then essentially supporting the status quo in everything else.

These strong words from environmental expert Dr. David Suzuki appeared on his web site, and in Sunday's Telegram. Here's why the Harper "Green Plan" is deceptive. Suzuki explains, that by

focusing on emissions “intensity” rather than actual emissions reductions, we end up with a plan that is guaranteed to keep Canada at the back of the pack in the industrialized world. Let's take an example. Alberta's tar sands are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing intensity means a reduction in the amount of emissions per barrel of oil, and that's good. But if the total amount of oil extracted doubles or more, then any modest gains in efficiency are completely wiped out.

Gore called the Conservatives' environmental plan is a "complete and total fraud" that is "designed to mislead the Canadian people." He said he was surprised to see that

the Tory plan employs the concept of "intensity reduction," which he said is poll-tested phrase developed in Houston by the so-called think tanks financed by Exxon Mobil and some other large polluters.

By the way, a favorite writer of most Newfoundlanders, Margaret Wente, also seems to lean towards the conservative ideology. In a January, 2007 article, she talked about adaptation, scientists who take a broad middle ground, and the benefits of a warmer Canada. She must have been content to see the following headline.

Arctic sea ice melting faster than most scientists project: study

Charge it Forward

If anyone is planning to do something "environmental" for earth day, that's good. One suggestion is to have that idea in mind, and to resolve to do it regularly, make it part of your life, like any daily habit. The world has procrastinated in doing the right things for the planet, and our western world, especially the U.S. has been highly responsible for the mess. Some people like to put the big corporates up on the pedestal because they "drive the economy". Well many will have helped drive it into the ground for current and future consumers. Costs of cleaning up emissions and for the mess we already have will no doubt be passed on to the consumer.

If a more long term vision of resource use had been developed decades ago to stretch out the use of it over much more time, the income would be steady, and less pollution accumulating at a high rate. However, as with much of society now, the attitude is "live now", "make profits now", "you only live once", "it's all about me". So the price for this living is to charge it forward, let future generations pay the price.

As a kid I would think about how oil and gas was finite, so if nobody tries to conserve it, then what will future generations do for energy? Well since then there are other alternatives for energy, though much still in development stages, but still, why should future generations be deprived of the choice of using oil and gas, just because our era's business want to drain every drop for profit now?

As a kid you might think, they'll want to spread the use of fossil fuels over many many generations and centuries so that other can get a chance to use this type of fuel. The topic of fossil fuels being finite is not talked about in terms of long term conservation. It's all for use now for oil company profits now. Too much reliance has been given to this type of energy. I have to wonder how much influence big oil/gas/coal has had on the development or perhaps more precisely, lack of development of alternate energies. We hear of so many reasons for increases in oil/gas, from threats to supplies, to wars, to more winter use, a CEO's broken toenail, blah, blah, blah. Hey, too bad we as a society don't move in unison like some flocks of birds, and take the oil companies in a new direction. If a large group of drivers were to commit to drive 50% less one day a week, or some variation of that, then we might see how the decreased demand will bring down gas prices, if at all, I wouldn't hold my breath.