Dear Editor,
I’m not the most conscientious recycler at my household, so I know how it feels to be nudged toward doing what we know is the right thing to do. So here’s another little nudge, for myself and everybody else. We live in a society and a time when we have more material possessions than we can use or maintain.
Who would have thought that our parents, who worked so hard to rebuild a modern world after World War II would have overshot the mark so far, that our generation’s great challenge is to find some place to put the leftovers?
Each municipality in Pontiac has waste management infrastructure in place. Imperfect works-in-progress that they are, it’s still our (all citizens) duty to the future, to get out of our habits and to make the system work as well as possible. The people who work in the business of gathering and transporting our waste are not getting rich quickly or easily, so let’s not bother with the comments about waste management and recycling being a cash grab. There is room for anyone to jump in, help out and grab as much cash as you can.
There are different kinds of waste material and the best way to sort them is at source. That means at your household. Kitchen scraps, pet waste, etc., do not belong with other trash. They should be composted. If you don’t have the time or inclination to do this, there’s probably an avid gardener nearby who would welcome the additional organic matter for their roses or tomatoes. The beauty of composting is that plants don’t really care where the manure comes from — it’s all food to them. The organic matter, when randomly mixed with trash destined for the landfill, is what causes most of the problems. Food waste, when wrapped in plastic, sealed and squished, festers and generates methane, which is poisonous to breathe and flammable, and sulfurous compounds, which stink and are also poisonous to breathe. So, wrapping your organic waste in plastic and shipping it out is just not a good approach.
We’ve all heard much about plastic waste, and how it’s choking rivers, beaches and oceans, mostly because people are conditioned to think that single-use plastic is better or safer than reusables and that it doesn’t matter if you just toss a straw or a bottle or a bag out the window into a ditch.
I’m here to suggest that is not a good practice. We were sold the idea that plastic is disposable but it simply is not. It’s just lying there, accumulating, because people feel more inclined to toss trash where they see trash already tossed. And it doesn’t go away on its own. Maybe some unpaid volunteer comes and picks it up, but it’s still a useless object that will go a landfill or worse, make its way to that Great Pacific Gyre, a giant floating mass of plastic waste twice the size of Texas, that is swirling in mid-ocean.
Do you really need a brand-new straw for each fast food soda or a new styrofoam cup and plastic lid for every cup of road coffee? Or a new plastic bottle of water every time you’re thirsty away from home? In all these cases, there are reusable versions available, and reusing items is one very effective way of reducing the trash burden.
It’s an inconvenient pain in the keester to have to carry your own utensils around, to clean up after yourself and to remind fellow citizens of Earth but it really is our home. As long as we don’t mess it up so badly the landlord kicks us to the curb without returning our damage deposit.
Robert Wills,
Thorne, Que.
