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The city of Toronto’s recycling program has become such a success that companies are lining up to take away its citizens' recyclables. Over-packaging of consumer products, the reason recycling programs were needed in the first place, have opened up lucrative opportunities for the winning suitors and the marketing campaigns that profit from them.
...some municipalities who outsource their garbage collection have signed exclusive deals with big waste management firms who collect high value material, like aluminum cans and easy-to-recycle clear plastic bottles - but don’t make an effort to sort or recycle lower-value products like bags.
"It's the municipal people. They don’t talk to us. They have cartels. You can’t get in the cartels. We could be 10 times our size right now if we had the support of the municipal people."
The idea that recycling programs help decrease our environmental footprint is preposterous. Someone has done a great selling job and the result has been a much greater reliance on petrochemical products, not less.
This trend is evident at your local grocery store, where recent health concerns over E. coli have forced stores to switch to plastic wrapped produce. Disregarding the cause of these outbreaks: the use of fecal matter from factory farms and humans to fertilize fields that have been stripped of nutrients by modern profit driven farming techniques.
In addition, to prevent bruising and aging during the 3000+ kilometer trip from South America, "fresh" and CHEAP produce is encased in protective plastic containers, designed to cushion the cargo from the bumps and bruises along the way. Egg producers are also moving away from the older, paper egg cartons to foam and clear plastic containers.
Let us compare the environmental footprint of a paper egg carton to a plastic container, which citizens are legislated to recycle. The plastic egg container is placed in a recycling box and taken to the curb. There it is picked up by a truck and taken to a facility where more energy will be used to melt down and transform the container into solid blocks of plastic. These blocks are then shipped to places like China where they will be used to manufacture more containers. They are then shipped back to Chile where the process begins again.
The paper egg carton is not quite environmentally sound either. Most are made of recycled paper products which follow the same energy-intensive manufacturing process as the plastic containers, except for one important difference: the paper carton can be added to a backyard compost heap where, within a month, it will have disintegrated and added nutrients to the soil.
As the lucrative parts of the recycling process are privatized, denying local governments badly needed income, environmentally friendly processes are left for tax payers to subsidize. The privatizing of profit and socializing of debt have eroded the social fabric of our towns and cities. Despite what our governments preach, cash dictates policy. Always has, always will.
update: January 17, 2009
The city of Toronto has recently made changes to their recycling program, restricting retailers from using biodegradable shopping bags.
"By June 1, 2010, retailers must also ensure that they offer only bags accepted in the City’s recycling program (no biodegradable plastic bags, bags with metal grommets or other non-plastic components)."
According to city officials, a single biodegradable bag can contaminate a block of recycled plastic, making it unsellable and worthless.
Wouldn't using biodegradable shopping bags eliminate the need for costly, tax-siphoning plastic bag recycling programs?
-tdm
C.R.E.A.M - Cash Rules Everything Around Me - Wu Tang Clan