In April 2009 Calgary, Alberta residents received their first blue-bins as part of the city wide curbside recycling program, "Too Good To Waste". As one Canada's richest and biggest cities, why has it taken so long for Calgary to join the world of recycling?
Growing up in Ontario it was ingrained into our minds that throwing recyclable materials in the trash was wrong. We were taught 'reduce, reuse, recycle' songs at school and watched "Captain Planet" cartoons at home. For Calgarians things were (are) different. With no Blue-box recycling program, residents who wanted to recycle were forced to either drive to a depot or pay for private home pickup. The most common method of dealing with recycling was to not recycle at all, everything went in the garbage with the rest of the waste. On average Calgary recycles only 20%(residential) of their waste, while Toronto recycles 42%(2006, residential), and Vancouver 55% (latest released numbers for all sectors).
There has been a lot of grumbling in Calgary regarding the new program. Some complaints are understandable - not being able to recycle plastic milk jugs, when the previous private companies picked them up, however; some are not so understandable, such as complaints about monthly fees. Every city that has a recycling program has a fee, whether it be included in your taxes or added onto your monthly utility bill (Calgary). It is time that people realize that you are not simply paying for your recycling to be taken away, you are paying for cleaner spaces for Canada's future generations.
Calgary, welcome to blue-bin recycling. You are only about 20 years behind schedule, but I guess you could say 'Better late than never' (?).
2 comments:
It's hard to fathom that Calgary has taken this long to support a city-wide recycling program. I think it springs directly from their strong belief in the validity of unrelenting growth and consumption. It bugs me when people complain about fees for recycling and continue to put off the growing ecological costs of our capitalism. Check out this interesting article about quantifying these ecological costs :
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/2008.10-environment-chris-wood-water-economy/
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