At this point in our city's history, as we face doubling population in the next 10 to 15 years, finding creative ways to carry on a legacy of caring for the Earth is our best hope for a healthy future. The quality of our water, air and food must be a priority for humans. With impending growth, we don't want to see fallout, we want a culture of young and old, immigrant and native, business and community, working toward the same goal of progress, unity and, of course, sustainability.
During the All-Candidates Forum, a Weyburn resident (after my own heart) asked the candidates what will be done about Weyburn offering plastic recycling. So, for once, I actually have an opinion on a current topic.
First of all, Weyburn really does need to make it a law that businesses recycle their cardboard. This is something that has been done in larger cities for decades.
Unlike other forms of packaging that come from plants, plastic is not biodegradable. It's not going anywhere, except maybe to its home 'continent', the Garbage Patch.
An island of plastic debris as dense as 200,000 pieces per square kilometre floats like a veritable galaxy of garbage in the North Atlantic Ocean. It has been compared to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a.k.a. Pacific Trash Vortex. These are not simple piles of trash that can be cleaned up with ease. These are hazardous and growing concerns.
It's not just a problem for people living near the ocean, either. It's going to have an impact on our future generations. As a prairie mother, with hopes of some day becoming a grandmother, a great grandmother and so on, I don't have the conscience to just sit idly by, especially when the matter is as simple as aiming for the recycling bin instead of the garbage!
There are plenty of wonderful things that can be made with recycled plastic, but first, it must be collected! Straws, bags, heat-sealed packaging, milk containers, wrappers, pill bottles, fruit and yogurt containers and so much more are labelled with a recycling symbol and the type of plastic. It's not much extra work if you're already keeping egg and milk cartons, glass and aluminum in addition to your paper recycling and refundable items.
A few years ago, when I lived in Calgary, we had to take our recyclable plastic to the smaller neighbouring towns for proper disposal. There were literally, at the time, no plastic recycling facilities in a city of one million people! When we lived in Canmore, it was a simple and easy-to-use collection bin where we just dropped off all of our non-refundable items in moments. From Canmore, at the time, the plastic shipped to Edmonton for processing.
To this day, n my home, we don't throw plastic away. As a result, we have nearly filled our shed half full with everything plastic that wasn't too badly soiled to be washed and stored. We are planning to take it to a collection bin we heard exists in a nearby town.
Of course it's going to take money for Weyburn to begin collecting plastic recycling. We will need a collection bin and a truck and driver to take it to the plastic recycling facility in Regina. Maybe a local business will step up to do the duty.
If I do have any say in how our city grows, it's going to be a conscious community that fosters environmental stewardship. I'm supposed to lead by example, but I have been, like many other hypocrites who walk by collections of debris (including refundables), complaining about how nobody picks it up, meanwhile I wouldn't want to dirty my purple leather gloves doing it myself. Maybe when I was younger I would have done more and don't have time now - but even if I did, how can I do it all for everyone? We could pick it up one month and wouldn't it be replaced with new garbage the next month?
Those who do better will have to keep influencing those who don't know better. I hope to be around long enough to see some real change in the way we handle garbage. I am sure there will be some surprising creative innovations!
