hehehe... I read this below from Globe and Mail yesterday:
PUBLICATION: GLOBE AND MAIL
DATE: 2007.07.27
PAGE: L1 (ILLUS)
BYLINE: REBECCA DUBE
SECTION: Globe Life
EDITION: Metro
DATELINE:
WORDS: 743
WORD COUNT: 682
RECYCLING: RUN ON COMPOSTERS Vancouver's garbage strike has a green
lining
REBECCA DUBE Like most eco-conscious Vancouver residents, Ann Gibbon
reduces, reuses and recycles.
She totes her groceries in cloth bags, sorts out her recycling and gets
electronic bank statements to cut down on paper waste.
In short, she thought she was pretty green.
Then the Vancouver municipal workers' strike started this week, and
garbage collection stopped. And Ms. Gibbon's family, like many others, got
a little greener. "We didn't like the idea of stinky old garbage
piling up in our garage. We really thought, 'We have to do something about
this.' " So her family bought a backyard composter, into which they toss
their yard waste and kitchen scraps. She estimates that they've
decreased their garbage by about 75 per cent.
"And the important thing is, the really gross stuff is down
dramatically," Ms. Gibbon says.
"It's totally easy and really wonderful. I feel liberated." Though the
summertime garbage strike may be a neat freak's nightmare, it could
become an environmentalist's dream.
Amid warnings that the labour standoff could stretch on for weeks,
Vancouver residents are rinsing their jars and tins extra-carefully to keep
bad smells and bugs away from their recycling, trying to reduce their
waste and running out to buy backyard composters.
Out of enlightened self-interest, city officials are encouraging
residents to step up their recycling efforts and consider composting, and
they seem to be heeding the call. A survey of Canadian Tire, Rona and Home
Depot stores in Vancouver this week found that most were sold out of
composters, while a few had just one left in stock.
The run on composters reverses the trend of the past decade. Last year,
30 per cent of people in British Columbia used a backyard composter,
according to Statistics Canada - ahead of the national average of 27 per
cent, but down from the 38 per cent figure the province achieved in
1994.
Researchers attributed the decrease to more people moving into
apartments and condominiums in Vancouver, where the composting rate is about 24
per cent.
"I think people will get more into composting" as a result of the
strike, says Susan Antler, executive director of the Composting Council of
Canada. While she wants the strike to be short and sweet for
Vancouverites' sake, she hopes it will get them thinking harder about their trash.
About half of household garbage is organic material that could be
composted, Ms. Antler says. You can put lawn and food waste except for meat,
bones and dairy products into a backyard composter, about the size of
a garbage bin. The organic material decomposes and transforms
(shrinking in size) into humus, a rich soil component prized by gardeners.
The best part is that composting is one small way to move off the power
grid, Ms. Antler says.
"You can control your own agenda versus being dependent on others," she
says. "You can basically become virtually independent." Raqib Burke
hopes the strike will serve as a wake-up call. He lives in a co-housing
complex in North Vancouver and produces no garbage - he either recycles
it, composts it or doesn't buy it in the first place. The strike
doesn't affect him at all, except, of course, for the smell that's starting
to permeate the city.
"Our entire lifestyle needs to be sustainable, and creating garbage is
a very unsustainable part of an unsustainable lifestyle," Mr.
Burke says. "We ought to be looking at ourselves in the mirror."
Together with the roughly 35 other residents of his complex, Mr.
Burke returns meat and fish bones to the butcher to be recycled.
(Companies collect the waste from butchers to make bone meal and blood
meal for gardening and agriculture.) Using the deposit money from their
beer, wine and juice bottles, they pay to ship their Styrofoam waste
to a specialized recycling plant.
Not everyone will go to such lengths, but Mr. Burke hopes the garbage
strike will inspire people to take simpler steps, whether it's backyard
composting or just rinsing out their recyclables more carefully.
So far, no savvy environmental groups have jumped on the strike as a
marketing opportunity for recycling and composting. But families such as
the Gibbons have already gotten the message on their own.
"I'm really buying into this composting," Ms. Gibbon says. "We're not
going to stop it after the strike is over. It does make you conscious of
how much waste you produce."