Are freakin’ kidding me?! Who thought this was a good idea? Instead of just throwing away our plastics and paper materials and shipping them to Detroit with the rest of our garbage, we developed an expensive, labour intensive recycling program. Because that’s good for the environment, right?
Wrong. Couldn’t be more wrong.
Toronto City Council could NOT be more wrong!
We are shipping materials from our Blue Bin program all the way to China because we don’t have the facilities or the cheap labour to deal with them here in Toronto. Or anywhere in Ontario - or anywhere in Canada for that matter.
Yup, that’s right. Toronto is shipping thousands of tonnes of recycling materials to China so that they can be recycled there into new materials that are then sold back to us. (Apparently they turn it into cardboard and inexpensive toys – probably covered in lead paint – and then sell them back to us). As much of 20,000 tonnes of Toronto's recycling material was sent all the way to China in 2007 and 2008.
There is NO WAY this is helping the environment! Have the Toronto City Councillors never heard of a concept called “carbon footprint”. What kind of a carbon footprint do you think that leaves on the world? Here is an excerpt from The Toronto Star article that describes the very long (and I’m sure very expensive) journey that our recycling materials have to make before they can be recycled:
“To get to China from Toronto, the mixed paper is stacked in bales, placed in shipping containers and sent across country to the port of Vancouver by train, said Jake Westerhof, of Canada Fibres, which sells Toronto's paper to Nine Dragons.
From Vancouver, it is placed on a large freighter ship and spends several weeks at sea before arriving in one of China's southern ports. It is moved into a truck a driven several hours before arriving at the massive Nine Dragons paper mill in the province of Guangdong.”
Good Job Mayor David Miller!
What a nightmare! They are sending our recycling materials over 12,000 km across land and sea. How can this be good for the environment? How can this be good for our city or our country?
Are you concerned about the environment? Then this has got to stop!
If you are concerned about how many jobs are being lost in Ontario, then this has got to stop!
If you think there is a serious lack of leadership in Canada - then this has got to stop!
That's to say nothing about the morality of doing business with a country with such a horrible record or human rights violations or the conditions that the chinese workers face in that country... as they recycle our garbage. Nice!
Please read the entire story at TheStar.com (this is where your tax dollars are going and this is what's happening with your recycling program): Blue-box leftovers go to China and back: Recycling efforts create 'contentious' carbon footprint
If you still think it’s worth your time and effort to recycle anything in this city, can you please explain why I should even bother. We should recycle our City Councillors. Send them to China – if they’d even take them.
"The majority of the residential group, if questioned, will confirm that they are anxious to support recycling initiatives, that they do so because they are concerned for the environment, and that they do themselves actively separate their waste for recycling. If what they avow is true, then it is somewhat surprising that source-separation schemes do not enjoy a much higher success rate. The reason appears to be that privately many householders find source separation inconvenient, occasionally untidy, and properly the responsibility of the municipality rather than themselves."
- A.G. Manser, Practical Handbook of Processing and Recycling Municipal Waste
"People in the suburbs are simply going to have to wake up and understand that they're destroying the environment."
- Toronto City Councillor Kyle Rae, 2006
