Your Grass is Trash
Editorial and photo by Marlene Wandel
Summer is here and it’s time to live, laugh, and litter outside. Thanks to spring clean-up crews and fresh growth, everything looks clean and green. How quickly we forgot about how awful all the detritus of our disposable lifestyles looked when the snowbanks receded, and started making a fresh mess.
It’s a fairly safe bet that most readers don’t blithely chuck their single-use coffee cup out of their car window or into the nearest ditch. But we have a garbage problem, whether it is invisibly tucked away into a garbage bag or boldly rolling down the street. Ontario exports one-third of its garbage to the United States., and anticipates an immediate landfill capacity problem should barriers to this dubious trade be enacted. The fast tracking of the potentially environmentally devastating Bill 5 is thought to be driven in part by the urgent need to find a place to store our garbage. There’s a wealth of trash out there because we value the convenience and profit of single-use items over the sustainability of life on earth.
It’s easy to use a travel mug for the commute to work, but yet countless branded beverage cups decorate our streets and waterways, in a perverse yet strangely successful advertising campaign. On the summer festival scene, reusable containers aren’t always an option. Food and beverage sales generate 25% of the summer festival revenue, so it’s no surprise that BYO sandwich and beer is not permitted. Depending on the event, even bringing an empty container is banned. The compostability or recyclability of the requisite take-away food container is only virtuous if composting collection is available and encouraged. The remains of the day at a music festival are sunburns, hangovers, and a mountain of garbage bags. Last year, attending a large music festival, I had a drink in a sturdy, single use plastic cup. Of the many potential future uses for the cup, getting another drink in it wasn’t an option. Multiply that experience by hundreds of thousands, and suddenly the lonely little robot moving trash in that Pixar classic WALL•E seems more prophetic than pathetic.
Work is in progress: through extended producer responsibility (EPR) initiatives, reduced production and increased recyclability and compostability of single-use products should emerge as producers assume responsibility for the full life-cycle of their products. Whether this means a shift to more reusables will continue to depend on profit and consumer appetite for change. Thunder Bay should have a green bin program by next year, meaning compostable festival ware has somewhere to go.
Here in beautiful NWO, it’s possible to cast our eyes to a lake or forest vista without encountering a mountain of garbage of our own making. In a possible future, it can stay that way, and we can raise our (reusable) glasses to hope for change.