Waste not, want not

Canada produces 30 million tonnes of waste each year

By Zaren White

Saving shazz from the dump – all the cool kids are doin’ it.

It’s Easy Being Green

Allow me to begin with an anecdote: when I was a teenager, I had a friend who had a whole room of his house, a spare bedroom, devoted to the congregation of junk and things that didn’t belong anywhere else. He called it The Problem Room.

When his family didn’t know what to do with something, when it was becoming a problem, they just shoved it in there. The Problem Room was the graveyard for things they couldn’t get rid of altogether, but didn’t want to look at. It’s analogous to garbage and landfills – we can’t make our waste disappear altogether, but we can shove it somewhere out of sight, with its garbage buddies, and try to forget it exists. We’re a very instant gratification society, and sadly, out of sight really is out of mind. How long are we going to keep using landfills as our Problem Room? When are we going to start thinking of waste as never really gone?

If we thought of landfills every time we went to dunk something in a garbage can, we would become less eager to throw everything away. Sure it’s convenient to throw everything out and let the garbage collectors take it away to the Land of Mordor, but convenience is irrelevant. We – as individuals, as a university, as a city, as a province – need to get real about diverting waste through reduction, reuse, and recycling.

It’s easy to look at the bag or few bags of trash that your household puts out each week as not being all that much, not taking up that much space in your local dump. But this egocentric mindset misses the point – everyone else is putting out as much household waste as you. It adds up, and fast. Even just looking around your street, the volume of garbage being trucked off to no man’s land every week is startling. Our discarded refuse doesn’t just go anywhere; it sits around and rots for a few eons first.

Waste Management – the company whose name is a straight-forward description of what they do – state on their website, “As the owner and operator of the largest network of landfills in the waste industry, Waste Management safely, responsibly, and carefully manages the disposal of more than 128 million tonnes of waste annually.” While I’m pleased by a lot of information on their website and their self-depiction as committed to sustainability and recycling, does North America – at least the parts using Waste Management’s services – need to create 128 million tonnes of waste every year? I wonder how much of that could have avoided the one-way cruise to the dumpster altogether by being recycled or composted.

Just as garbage adds up, so does recycling. On a large scale, it’s astounding what the process of recycling materials can do to divert wasted material. Through Waste Management and their partnership with WM Recycle America, they recycle more than 4.1 million tons of paper – which equals more than 41 million trees. If 41 million trees were used for all that paper, I think we’d all like to see that material avoid meeting its maker in the landfill.

Take a long, hard look at your own practices. Are you making the extra effort to recycle household materials? I’m not just talking about your aluminum cans and beer bottles – what about paper towel and toilet paper rolls, for example? Where do they go?

I started saving toilet paper rolls for recycling last year, and after a few months, I had a humungous bag too big to carry. It’s amazing to consider the space that my household’s toilet paper rolls alone would have taken up in a landfill had they not been given a second chance. While Newfoundland and Labrador takes its sweet time catching up on convenient and accessible residential recycling services, why not bring your stuff to campus? Paper recycling bins can be found all around campus (although still not in the UC food court – we’re still waiting on that unfulfilled request) so bring your used and reused paper there to be recycled. I personally funnel all my recyclables – everything from the standard juice cartons and cardboard to less widely recycled jars, containers, and even shampoo bottles – to my mother who pays for a private recycling collection service.

But you don’t necessarily have to do that – schools are always looking for stuff for recycling blitzes. You can also bring your cans and bottles to campus. A lot of people don’t realize that a portion of the proceeds go to the campus Food Bank.

As a country, Canada produces approximately 30 million tonnes of waste in a year. I imagine that a scattered tonne didn’t have to end up in a landfill. We need to move away from disposable, over-packaged, wasteful products and packages and take the time and effort to divert this waste. The next time you instinctively move to toss something, think about where it’s going and how it’s never really gone.

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