Not because the practice is widespread in Europe and I think every country should do what Europe does. [link to London Free Press]
(I’m sure I’d look cool in a beret but that’s another story).
But because industry currently pays between 40 - 50 per cent of our blue box programs yet produce 99.99 per cent of the trash that should be recycled. If they wrap things up in styrofoam, cardboard and plastic then they should deal with the costs of recycling that stuff.
And not me.
If I want a pound of nails I only want to pay for a pound of nails. Not the little packages they come in. I’ve got a lot of packages already. I can just use one over again. And again and again. And when it breaks I’ll go to the hardware store with a wooden box with a nice rope handle. Made in Canada, in my workshop, out of scrap.
I bet, once industry has to pay for recycling they’ll get a lot smarter about packaging.
There. That’s my point of view.
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What do you think?
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1 comment:
I agree! Similar to the polluter pays principle, manufacturers who use/produce packaging should bear (at least a fair portion of) the responsibility for the proper end of life management of it.
If they were responsible, waste management and recycling centers would be so much more efficient and less energy intensive than they are now.
Recycling in Ontario is in a sorry state. It uses a huge amount of resources to process and sort the materials, and this it does so imperfectly that many companies won't accept materials for reuse because they are so contaminated by unwanted items, so that much of it eventually ends up in the landfill anyway, not to mention the fact that a lot of what we throw in the blue box, we don't actually have the facilities to process (like plastic egg cartons), leaving the consumer, mistakenly, feeling like they are doing the good and right thing, while manufacturers continue to pass the buck!
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