I’m starting to think recycling is a fool’s game.
We had a lot of printed material left over from the weekend’s bike show. You always print a lot more than you need. So we piled the boxes and wrote “recycle” on them. The in-house cleaning crew would take those boxes and put them in the proper places for pick-up. One of our guys said, “they won’t recycle this stuff. It’s too shiny.”
“We recycle magazines”, I replied. “Same thing.”
“Yeah,” said my pal. “But magazines go straight into the landfill.”
Do they? I don’t know. But I’ve been at some pretty big organizations that don’t recycle and it crosses my mind every time I rinse a can and tear off its label. Is there really a point to it? People I work with toss pop cans into the garbage without giving it a second thought, despite the availability of blue boxes.
I was once told that each aluminum can equals a lightbulb worth of energy. I don’t even know if that’s true, but it hit home to me. Meantime my city is delaying the beginning of a green bin program once again. Table scraps and vegetable matter are all being tossed into the trash, still, by every resident in this city. Again, I ask the question, in the big scheme of things does it really matter?
I’m so glad we have the green bins in K-W! But Guelph was way ahead of the curve… I think they started the wet/dry system there 15 or more years ago.
Recycling is very much based on the capacity of the individual city and the recycling equipment they have access to with there being differences from city to city.
For example, here in Toronto a couple of years ago, the city made a big deal about there inability to properly recycle Tim Horton coffee cups, not because it couldn’t be done but because we simply didn’t have the necessary equipment which other cities did. So instead of expanding our capacity by purchasing the appropriate equipment they passed another stupid by-law forcing Tim Horton’s to redesign their coffee cups, well mainly the lids.
Yes it does