Recycling needs revamping
Our garbage is coming back to haunt us. What are we going to do about it?
I’m all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily …. The opening lines to The Clash song Lost in the Supermarket reverberate in my head while I do my daily shopping at the supermarket down the street. With such a big store so close, it’s like having a pantry out back. I just take a short walk to where almost everything I can imagine to eat is waiting to be picked up off the shelf and put in my basket. Every time I enter the store I marvel at the abundance and selection of foodstuffs and I give thanks that this is how easy shopping can be.
But, as the song suggests, it’s no longer a happy experience hunting and gathering my food at the local store. Where before I gave desire its head and filled my cart with whatever my hunger demanded, now I stop and wonder: do I really want this product and its excessive packaging? Can I recycle this packaging? Or is it garbage? Lately, I’ve been denying myself some of my favourite tasty treats because I can’t, in good conscience, put all that plastic packaging into the world just because I want a taste sensation. I have been moved, as many have been I hope, by the story of the whale found washed onshore in the Philippines with over 80lbs of plastic in its stomach. It wasn’t the only one, only the most pitiful example. All of them dead with full bellies, starved on plastic.
Hamilton. We have a problem. It’s not just our problem; it’s a problem shared by people all over the world. But it’s a problem that we’ve been avoiding, shipping offshore to other countries, desperate for them to handle. We are drowning in our garbage. It’s an embarrassment is what it is.
I say this is Hamilton’s problem because that’s where most of the waste originates, in municipalities that gather it from their citizens. We are the source of this trash, our homes and businesses. I am grateful for our trash collection service, with weekly pickups I don’t have to wonder what to do with all this crap that keeps collecting around the house. As citizens we off-load this worry to our elected officials and empower them to come up with ways to turn our trash into gold. Businesses engage in other businesses to manage their waste, especially specialized waste such as medical and food processing waste. But it’s not working very well.
Last year China decided to stop accepting our recycling because of contamination. So caught up are we in our disposable mentality that we can’t even be trusted to recycle properly. I know people who absolutely refuse to recycle as a intrusion into their time. It puts them out that recycling is an expected way of living in today’s world. They long for the days when everything went in the garbage and out of sight, out of mind. But I’m guilty of it as well. I throw into the blue box what I believe should be recyclable rather than what actually is recyclable. To face the amount of plastic that still goes into the trash is maddening and I demand to know, from no one in particular, why? I blame manufacturers who insist on excessive packaging and marketers who drive the problem. For what is packaging, outside of its basic function of preservation, than an opportunity for marketing and enticement? Long gone are the days of plain paper bags and wrappings you could reuse around the home. In Quebec, the Metro chain of supermarkets is taking the lead with bring your own container stores, certainly a step in the right direction.
There are 103 containers of Canadian trash sitting in the Philippines, abandoned by the Canadian company that brought it there. I hope we would be mad and fed up if 103 containers of foreign trash were sitting in Hamilton Harbour for years. The hows and whys of how this came to be aren’t clear, but the Philippines don’t want it and are demanding it be removed. To where is the question. We don’t want it back, we have more than enough to get rid of.
According to StatsCan data reported in 2015, Canadians increased their waste production by 7 per cent over 2012 figures. While the report notes that population increases and recycling programs had an impact on this number, the bottom line is that we are increasing our trash output. Our recycling programs, the precursors of a new green future, are mired in confusion and inefficiencies. And we’ve spent millions and millions on recycling and we still don’t know how to turn garbage into gold. Where do we go from here?
Hamilton. We have a problem. It’s not just our problem; it’s a problem shared by people all over the world. But it’s a problem that we’ve been avoiding, shipping offshore to other countries, desperate for them to handle. We are drowning in our garbage. It’s an embarrassment is what it is. MARGARET SHKIMBA