waste

Saturday April 9, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday April 9, 2022

What Toronto wanted in the federal budget for housing — and what it got

April 7, 2017

One of the central pieces of the federal budget unveiled Thursday was affordable housing — $10 billion earmarked to tackle the crisis country-wide.

It’s a mix of funding for projects and policy changes aimed at making housing more affordable.

So what was Toronto looking for and what did it get?  And what will the budget mean for one of the least affordable cities in the country?

Much of the $10-billion investment focuses on boosting the supply of homes, something that is key for Toronto. 

February 1, 2017

The city was eyeing an extension of funding for a project it’s partnered on with the federal government: the Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI).

That wish was granted. The budget proposes to extend the program, which creates new affordable rental housing for marginalized people experiencing, or at risk of, homelessness, at a cost of $1.5 billion over two years.

May 7, 2014

The largest portion of the $10-billion budget pledge is $4 billion dedicated to what the government is calling a “Housing Accelerator Fund.” The money will be for municipalities like Toronto to speed up housing development by slashing red tape, and the federal government estimates it can create 100,000 new units over five years.

When it comes to speeding up development, Bailão says the city has projects on the go for which they’d like to partner financially with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) — mainly its Housing Now initiative, which activates city-owned sites for the development of affordable housing within mixed-income, mixed-use, transit-oriented communities.

November 20, 2019

“I think all orders of government need to work together because if they really want to build 100,000 units … we have 15,000 here in the pipeline that need their financing and we need to make sure that financing is there,” said Bailão.

The question among many advocates is how quickly some of these measures can be implemented in big cities like Toronto, and how much coordination there can be between different levels of government.

“For this city, what’s needed is significant amounts of money and funding that can be spent quickly,” said Matti Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute and a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto.

“We’re in this crisis. We need all hands on deck, and we need that real coordination and we need a sense of urgency to back it up.” (CBC) 

 

Tuesday January 18, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday January 18, 2022

COVID-19 home testing kits: should we be worried about their environmental impact?

March 10, 2021

The highly transmissible Omicron variant has led to renewed interest in home testing kits. The UK is getting through millions of these tests each week, while US president Joe Biden has just ordered 500 million kits to send to Americans.

Along with vaccinations and better medication, the availability of rapid testing has meant that many countries are in a much better place to combat the pandemic than they were a year ago.

As with everything, though, testing has an environmental impact that warrants some investigation. So should we be worried about millions – or billions – of plastic test tubes and swabs?

Wednesday April 22, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday April 22, 2020

Single-use plastic is having a resurgence during the pandemic

For those seeking silver linings in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the notable drop-off in air pollution has been a recurring bright spot. But while theskies might be clearing up (at least temporarily) while millions of people shelter in place, humans are poisoning the planet in other ways. Increased demand for medical supplies, households stocking up on tons of goods, and fears over COVID-19 spreading across different surfaces has single-use plastics on the rise — and as Wired reports, we’re running out of places to put it.

March 12, 2019

As more plastic waste pours in, the already overwhelmed recycling system is at risk of getting completely buried. Prior to coronavirus, many recycling companies were already struggling to deal with the more than 300 million tons of plastic discarded every year — nearly 50 percent of which is single-use. According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University, only about 10 percent of all discarded plastic products in the United States actually get recycled — a fact the plastic industry knew for years while touting recycling programs that would never be viable. Nearly 75 percent ends up in landfills, where it can sit and erode for hundreds of years, releasing carbon dioxide as it degrades and often making its way into waterways and oceans. It’s likely that as the country produces more plastic waste in this time of crisis, even more will be heading to landfills, as the already inundated recycling firms slow their operations. “Many recyclers, because of health and safety concerns, are also stopping the service,” Tom Szaky, CEO of recycling company TerraCycle, told Wired. “Recycling — that’s been in sort of a crash — is now getting even worse.”

April 24, 2018

Those slowdowns are happening in tandem with a resurgence in single-use plastics. This is happening for a number of reasons, both out of necessity and potentially unfounded fears. Plastic bags have made a comeback during thecoronavirus crisis due to concerns that reusable bags may carry the virus. A number of states and cities have reversed plastic bag bans and some have even instituted restrictions on reusable totes. While it is known that coronavirus can survive longer on certain surfaces, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that the virus is more viable on a cloth tote than a plastic bag, particularly if the bag is washed after use — though the plastic bag is likely to be discarded after one use, limiting additional exposure. With people worried that the virus can be transmitted through a number of surfaces, the demand for packaged goods is on the rise as well. According to FoodNavigator, demand for packaged goods has skyrocketed in Europe by as much as 111 percent for some items as compared to the previous year.

There is also the fact that the price of oil has dropped dramatically, which makes producing plastic goods cheaper than usual — and they aren’t all that expensive to begin with. Plastics are made from oil, and when the price of oil drops far enough, it can result in it actually being cheaper to produce new plastic products than recycle old ones. And when the demand for recycled goods disappears, more plastic ends up in landfills, slowly eroding and polluting the planet.

Plastic waste doesn’t have the same effect as something like air pollution — we don’t immediately see the damage as it occurs. But the change in our consumption habits will be immediately felt at the landfills that are already being overrun. It will be felt by oceans that are already at risk of having more pieces of plastic than fish by 2050. Even the short burst of uptick in plastic waste could cause significant disruption to the waste and recycling ecosystems. According to Waste Dive, dozens of cities and counties across the country have suspended recycling programs entirely. Rachel Meidl, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, told Wired, “materials that would normally find its way to recyclers are being channeled to landfills and incinerators.” So before touting that “we are the virus” meme and spouting off to your friends about how the Earth is healing while we’re all trapped indoors, remember that there are a lot of ways we can hurt the planet without ever leaving our couches. (Mic) 

 

Saturday July 21, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday July 21, 2018

These are dark days for recycling and composting in Hamilton

If you’re among the thousands of citizens who try to do the right things about recycling and waste diversion, these are not good times.

It’s a discouraging double-whammy.

May 2, 2018

Part one happened early this year. After years of imploring citizens to put items like coffee cup lids, Styrofoam and black plastic in the recycling box, city officials had to reverse that. It was, in the words of city recycling manager Emil Prpic, a “market-driven” eco-dilemma. The problem is, virtually no one wanted to buy those recycled goods. In January, China, which was the giant in the buying market, cracked down on imported plastics. It applied new more stringent purity standards that ruled out most of our plastics.

There must be more buyers than China? Yes. But China has been voracious, consuming more than half the world’s recyclables. There isn’t adequate infrastructure yet to make up for that lost capacity.

So in Hamilton, and many other municipalities, recyclables have to be stored or handled by a third party. Tragically, some of this stuff is ending up in our landfills.

That was bad enough, but then more recently the second whammy hit. The city’s composting plant on Burlington Street East was stinking. It has been odiferous for a long time, but recently the problem has been getting worse. Last month, responding to growing citizen complaints, the plant was closed until a solution can be found.

April 24, 2018

So that food and organic waste you have been separating? It’s going into our only landfill site in Glanbrook. Something like 660 tonnes — daily.

So no food waste recycling. Limited plastics recycling, with the most common types — so-called low grade plastics — being not recyclable because no one wants them. If they’re mixed in with other, legitimate recycling, they contaminate them and have to be sorted by hand otherwise the entire load is useless.

Just to add insult to injury, we’re living under a new government that doesn’t appear to believe the environment matters at all, and next door to a superpower that is losing its mind and racing backwards on environmental protection. (Source: Hamilton Spectator) 

 

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Tuesday April 24, 2018

 

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday April 24, 2018

‘We need to rethink the entire plastics industry’: Why banning plastic straws isn’t enough

Britain announced this week that it plans to ban the sale of single-use plastic straws, as support for similar bans grows in Canada and around the world.

March 6, 2015

Advocates say such straw bans should help reduce plastic pollution that harms wildlife and ecosystems, but we need to monitor the effects of such policies. And they say bans may not be feasible for most of the plastics in our lives, so broader changes to the way we produce, consume and dispose of plastics are needed to make a real difference.

Jennifer Provencher, a postdoctoral researcher at Acadia University who studies the ingestion of plastic pollution by wildlife, said Britain’s ban is “an incredibly important step towards minimizing and using plastics more responsibly.”

She noted that single-use plastic items like straws and stir sticks are generally used only for a few minutes before they’re discarded, but can persist in the environment for centuries because plastics don’t typically decompose within a human lifetime.

Scientists estimate we’ve made 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic since the 1950s and 6.3 billion tonnes have already become waste.

More than 330,000 pieces of plastic and foam waste were picked off 2,800 kilometres of Canada’s shoreline by volunteers during beach cleanup events last year, including 17,654 straws — the ninth most common item found during cleanups supported by Ocean Wise and WWF-Canada. Worldwide, 409,087 straws and stirrers were picked up in beach cleanups around the world in 2017, the Ocean Conservancy reports.

Because of their small size, disposable straws are rarely recycled and often end up in the environment.

There, they can cause serious injuries to animals, as shown in a 2015 video that shows a straw being pulled out of a sea turtle’s nostril — the graphic, viral video has been viewed more than 21 million times. (Source: CBC)