Maybe we should chew on this article I copied from Feb. 11th Toronto Star.
"Under the watchful frown of a child who's no doubt well-versed in the gospel of the 3Rs reduce, re-use and recycle a passenger waiting to board a flight at Pearson International Airport dutifully sorts her accumulated garbage for disposal.
Styrofoam into this slot, plastic into that slot, newspapers here, food waste there.
Fifteen minutes later, a cleaning lady comes along, upends all the bins and tosses their contents into a single giant trash cart.
What the ...?
Yet this is not an uncommon occurrence across Metro. Even bins marked for specific trash deposit make little efficient recycling sense, with aluminum and plastic commingled. That only means separating the trash streams further down the line, if, indeed, it's done at all far away from prying eyes.
But the consumer feels better about it, blithely unconcerned about what might just be Earth-hug window-dressing, a façade of earnest waste disposal for the purpose of recycling, which is the Western world's 21st century pan-religion.
Ditto for the logic of shipping thousands of tonnes of Blue Box "leftovers'' the dirty bits and unsorted paper scraps unfit for most recycling mills in this country to China monthly, as detailed in a front-page report by the Star's Moira Welsh on Monday, there to be sorted by what an industry official described as "an extra layer of labour.'' That's euphemism-speak for cheap Chinese labour hand-plowing through our gunk before it's fed into a humongous coal-fired mill further polluting the noxious air that Chinese people breathe.
And the process of delivering this valuable trash to China or South Korea, in the case of our "polycoat'' milk and juice cartons which involves trans-Canada shipment to Vancouver, then freight shipment across the Pacific, doesn't measure the whole exercise's "carbon footprint,'' the pollutant cost to the environment of sending garbage thataway that will likely come back thisaway as recycled products and packaging.
Geoff Rathbone, general manager of Toronto's solid waste department, points out that the freight containers would be making the back and forth treks anyway.
The fact we, Canadians, are contributing heavily to China's pollution crisis though their mills supposedly adhere, as per contract, to environmental standards (as if) well, that's by the by. Better there than here.
As for the commingling and recycling contamination of garbage in malls and the like, that's not the city's responsibility. The Ministry of the Environment has carriage of most commercial sector compliance.
The city manages residential waste disposal through the Blue Box program, public space garbage collection from street bins, and trash churned out by some 20,000 small businesses. That doesn't include the large privately managed businesses, such as malls, that have their own contracts with material recycling facilities.
Some are sophisticated third-generation facilities, able to stream and sort for a slew of recycling and diversion materials; some are not so efficient, but easier on the commercial wallet. Even government contracts vary from municipality to municipality so that what's captured in one jurisdiction slides past in others. Toronto's blue bin program, for example, no longer requires consumers to sort out plastic and glass at source; everything goes in and is sifted at the plant.
Collection of Blue Box waste across Ontario municipalities creates public confusion and standardizing the program is one of the proposals contained in a draft preliminary report prepared by Waste Diversion Ontario for the Ministry. It also addresses the merits of making the manufacturer/distributor entirely responsible for a product's "life cycle,'' from packaging to clean disposal, rather than the current 50-50 split in Blue Box program costs.
Private industry is generally more efficient than government. Forced to clean up after themselves, they'd probably find a way to do it on the cheap and still turn a recycling profit."
DH had the linen closet all neatly arranged with the flattened boxes and rinsed out bottles.
It's never too late for any country!
