Last week I witnessed an incident in our "recycling" process that greatly disturbed me, and begs a lot more questions around what happens to the stuff we so diligently work to keep out of our landfill sites.
Because we don't live in town and don't have green and blue bins, last week I took a small trailer load of assorted recyclables to the "recycling" side of the Didsbury landfill site.
I appropriately binned all the materials except the cardboard, because the large cardboard bin was just then in the process of being loaded onto a hauling truck.
Seeing no other place to leave the cardboard, I waited to see if another empty bin was to be set in the location. In a few minutes the same truck with the same bin, now empty, returned from the landfill side of the site. When in position, I put my cardboard into the bin.
I was bothered by what I had seen, so I approached the driver and politely asked what was going on by dumping the cardboard into the landfill. And very politely, she replied that they were waiting for appropriate bins to be delivered so the proper processes could begin again. In the meantime, dumping the cardboard was the solution.
So, what is the true state of "recycling" in Didsbury, Mountain View County, the rest of Alberta, or even in Canada? It would be interesting and enlightening to get some current, accurate, reports from the agencies responsible for the government mandated recycling programs.
It would also be very interesting to know what else happens to the materials we as individuals, households and businesses so diligently sort, store, and transport to try to keep them out of the landfills.
If we are just wasting our efforts, time and fuel, in what is beginning to look like a make-work project, perhaps it is time to rethink what is being done. Maybe putting "everything" into the "garbage" bins at the source, might be the most cost-effective ultimate solution in the long run.
Informing the citizens with accurate details may go a long way to regain buy-in to this flawed process.
– Jack Terpstra, Mountain View County
