Don’t Treat Your Waste Like Garbage

(February 19) - Never mind global warming. There are better ways to raise the temperature on a cold February day. Trash talk. It gets the blood boiling. It inflames the passions. Wherever you go in Guelph, ask about waste disposal and see what happens. Snow melts, ice dams burst and tongues go into overdrive. Everyone has an opinion and no one is shy about expressing it.

We’ll see what happens on Thursday. The city is developing a solid waste management master plan. If all goes well, it will define the future of waste management, diversion and disposal. There’s an open house coming up the day after tomorrow at the Cutten Club. You’ll need to grab an early supper, though. It starts at 5:30. That’s not the best time of day to attract the people who carry blue bags to the sidewalk. Most working families are busy watching the stove at that time of day.

Still, if you want to get your opinions out, you can always phone or e-mail your city councillors. One of the good things about the ones we have these days is that most of them actually listen. They even respond. They have a committee looking at the scope of the problem and how other cities handle theirs. The city even hired a consulting company to help the committee members stay focused. There are bag loads of opportunities to make yourself heard.

There is a lot more to waste management than asking a city worker to pick up your leavings and toss them into the back of a truck. It begins with what you buy and how much you throw away. The more there is, the more the city has to spend putting it where you won’t have to see it again. The quickest and cheapest solution to waste management is to stop wasting. Reduce your input from the Mall and you’ll reduce your output to the kerb. When you do put the trash out, don’t treat it like garbage. Wash the empty bean can. Separate the bits that don’t get along with each other: put the paper towel in one bag, the cardboard box in another, and the Styrofoam in a third. This makes it a lot easier for the city to deal with later. When the city saves money, some pressure comes off our property tax bill.

Thursday’s open house will look at the other end of the waste process. What happens after you put it out? In this brave new world of acronyms, we are adding two Ds to the already familiar three Rs. Diversion and disposal. We don’t have a landfill in Guelph any more, and we’re not likely going to get another one. So we need to divert. Whether we divert it to places that use it for something else, or we dispose it in someone else’s landfill is very much up to you. The more we sort, the more we’ll divert.

We’re at 39 per cent now. The goal is 60. This will be helped when we get the new composting facility up and running. This should be a city priority. Compost doesn’t have to smell. The technology exists to do mass composting without disrupting all the neighbourhood garden parties. Help out by getting your own backyard composter. It will turn your egg shells and apple cores into rich soil for your garden. You can’t lose.

Another option the city must look at is incineration. If we go this route, it would have to become a provincial initiative. Technological advances have made it safer than it used to be, but it is extremely expensive. Too much for any individual municipality to shoulder. Incinerators should be regional operations, if they operate at all. Most of what can be burned safely can also be reused and recycled. Incineration should be a solution of last resort. Reducing waste to ashes removes the incentive to reduce waste.

The choices ahead of us are not easy ones, and there will not be a cheap way out. Part of the difficulty is that previous city councils have avoided the problems. You can only sweep so much dirt under the carpet before you end up damaging the carpet itself. That’s where we are now, and we’ve nobody to blame but ourselves. By the same token, we also have the solution within ourselves.