Sludge Watch ==> Trash - where did 'REDUCE' go?

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE

This was the jingle in the 1980s.  We were supposed to move on to 'Clean 
Production'.

What happened to that?

............................................................................


Toronto
EYE WEEKLY
02.08.07


The least effective 'R'
By Kelly McManus

Toronto is patting itself on the back over its bulging blue boxes. But 
recyclables are still trash, even if they don't go straight to the dump.
Standing in the viewing gallery at the Dufferin Transfer Station's sorting 
facility, I'm looking at mountains of blue box trash. Crushed cans, plastic 
bottles, newspapers and corrugated cardboard zoom along through a maze of 
conveyors and bins, all of it separated, piled, squashed and squeezed out 
the other end as multi-coloured bales of junk.

At one point in the assembly, electrically charged aluminum cans leap into 
the air, arcing in the dull indoor light like hopeful little salmon, 
glinting as they leave behind the torrent of plastic bottles and old bags.

This is one of two stations that process the contents of Toronto's blue 
boxes for sorting, bailing and shipping. The city's recycling and compost 
programs – designed to decrease the daily loads of Toronto garbage heading 
out in big diesel trucks to Michigan landfills – have helped the diversion 
rate skyrocket from 27 per cent in 2001 to somewhere around 44 per cent in 
2006.

In hard tonnes, those percentages mean, for one, that we've increased our 
capture rates for recyclables by 25,000 tonnes annually; they also mean that 
in 2005, our blue box program saved over 150,000 tonnes of recyclables from 
the dump.

Those are good things, right? Well, yes. And no.

Our bulging blue boxes are worrying environmentalists and researchers, 
because recyclables are still discarded trash, even if they don't go 
straight to the dump, and recycling that trash instead of sending it to a 
landfill still generates carbon emissions and industrial waste.

“We need to consume less, period,” says Dr. Charles Hostovsky of the 
University of Toronto, “and recycling can take away the incentive to reuse 
packaging.”

Toronto City Councillor Gord Perks agrees. “In many ways,” says Perks, who 
has worked with Greenpeace and the Toronto Environmental Alliance (and was 
Eye Weekly's Enviro columnist until 2006), “getting the blue box has 
foreclosed the discussion about reduction and reuse.”

Ah, reduction and reuse. Remember the good old three Rs, reduce, reuse and 
recycle? Well, not all Rs are created equal. The fact is recycling is the 
inferior R, like the weak-chinned younger brother who never quite lives up 
to the standard of his older siblings.

Consider the enormous energy required to recycle our blue box garbage – 
energy that runs dump trucks and fork lifts, transfer stations and 
mechanical sorters. We ship those materials, break them down and create new 
products, creating carbon emissions, by-products and new wastes. For every 
tonne of aluminum we recycle, for example, we generate six tonnes of carbon 
dioxide. Recycling old paper materials gives us not only new paper 
materials, but paper sludge and waste, ink and paper fibres that have to be 
disposed of by landfill or incinerator.

The problem, environmentalists say, is that reduction and reuse – vastly 
preferable approaches to garbage – are things we, as citizens, must do 
largely on our own: making choices to avoid buying excess packaging or 
choosing to reuse our old glass bottles, for example. Tossing things in the 
blue box, by contrast, becomes nearly automatic, and we don't think about 
the energy-intensive industrial impacts of recycling.

As Dr. Hostovsky puts it, when we walk our single-portion soup cans and 250 
ml water bottles to the curb in a recycling bin, we “see ourselves as 
environmental stewards,” like we've done a wonderful, selfless thing. “To 
some degree,” he says, “what the blue box system does is alleviate the 
individual's guilt about convenience items.” According to Hostovsky and 
other environmentalists, we shouldn't be placing those materials in the blue 
box because we simply shouldn't be using them at all. “People get a false 
sense of security [from recycling], but we're still consuming at an 
unsustainable rate,” Hostovsky says.

He's right: we're consistently spewing out more garbage on a yearly basis. 
We may have made some serious inroads with our garbage-diversion programs, 
especially here in the GTA (remember, this city accounts for one fifth of 
all the garbage produced in Ontario), but since the early days of the blue 
box, garbage production has been on the rise. Ontario's annual trash tonnage 
has actually increased by more than 50 per cent, from eight million tonnes 
in 1993 to 13.3 million tonnes in 2005.

Now what do we do? Recycling isn't the ecological Holy Grail we've come to 
think it is. So how do we get to the point where we start seriously reducing 
our total trash tonnage, recycling included? Environmentalists point out 
that convenience packaging is so pervasive that consumers aren't given real 
options to dramatically reduce waste.

Perks and Hostovsky both cite Germany's Green Dot movement, an ecological 
revolution that began with frustrated consumers literally ripping away 
excess packaging and handing it back to the checkout at grocery stores. That 
kind of action can increase awareness, but its real aim is to have producers 
stop creating that wasteful packaging in the first place.

Can we force manufacturers to reduce wasteful packaging? “That's the central 
failure in waste-management policy in Ontario for the past 20 years,” says 
Perks. “We've failed to put the responsibility where the power really is.” 
Perks is talking about “extended producer responsibility,” the idea, 
implemented heavily in Europe, that a manufacturer should see the total 
costs of a product through its full life cycle – so the company that makes 
the car engine, paint tin or plastic bottle should not only pay to create 
it, but should cover the costs of disposing of it, too. As a result, 
industry inevitably finds ecological solutions to packaging and waste in 
order to save money on disposal.

The obstacle for Toronto activists and politicians is that the next giant 
step forward in responsible waste management undoubtedly lies in policy 
making at federal and provincial levels. “The city [of Toronto] is reaching 
a point where it's maxing out in its powers,” says Dr. Mark Winfield, 
director of the Pembina Institute's Environmental Governance program. “Laws 
about the design and use of materials are the next step. But, fundamentally, 
[Toronto] lacks the legislative tools, the scope of jurisdiction to get at 
the base issues underlying waste management.”

We need to decrease the waste we produce, period: landfill and blue box 
waste combined. Imagine the future of the Dufferin Transfer facility if we 
truly started to produce less residential waste. Imagine that on top of 
slashing the total annual truckloads of waste heading to the landfill, we 
started sending less and less recyclable material to the transfer station, 
too. Imagine we did this because we just stopped using single-serving cans 
and cereal boxes, bottled water and double-wrapped Styrofoam meat packages.

Is it tough to imagine? As environmentalists point out, “not doing” is an 
important next step for us – not buying products that use too much 
packaging, not recycling as much material because we're making do with less.

Diverting kitchen scraps or tuna cans is only going to take us so far, and 
recycling is just the beginning – not the end – of our environmental 
responsibilities.

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