Recycling
I DON’T MEAN TO SUGGEST that we deserve all kinds of credit just for recycling our flourescent light bulbs. Really, it should be standard practice to go the extra mile and take the old tubes to one of several conveniently located household hazardous waste depots provided by the city. But I’m making a big deal out of it to give ourselves positive reinforcement, so that we keep on doing it. Sometimes at the end of a long week of work, you can’t be bothered to start separating the trash and take it to different locations. But if we don’t make the extra effort, then we’re personally responsible for poisoning our own water table with mercury. Note that even though we are employing a lighting technology that consumes less fossil fuels, it is still problematic because it produces hazardous waste. This can only be a temporary solution; ultimately, we need to transition all of our activities to nature-neutral ones. But for now, we’ll half-step and take responsibility for our part. In the photo on the right, Peter is obviously removing the old tubes, and in the one on the left, a jedi knight employed by the city is deftly swinging several light sabres at once, obscuring his secret identity.
AT THE VERY START of the millennium, the City Councillors Waste Diversion Task Force committed themselves to reducing Toronto’s solid waste production to absolute zero by the year 2010. But two years ago, having failed to ramp up the recycling program to appropriate levels, City Council disappointingly revised its own goals downward and resolved themselves to reducing Toronto’s solid waste production to only thirty per cent by 2010. Bay Street bureaucrats sift through the statistics and juggle the numbers in order to put the best possible face on a dirty dilemma. Meanwhile, garbage collectors go on strike this week, and the termination of Toronto’s contract with the Michigan landfill looms on the horizon mere months away.
AS PART of our commitment to greatly reduce the amount of waste that we produce, Green Apple has begun to research the various options available to us. This may have started out as a simple search on the web for recycling companies in the Greater Toronto Area, but it has morphed and mushroomed into something else entirely: a mission to pinpoint the final resting places of materials that we don’t want in our own backyards; to investigate the social and political implications of the modern waste-management industries; and ultimately, to understand the so-called Story of Stuff, and how we might radically reposition ourselves in that storyline.
