Garbage sales pitch
In which I disclose secrets from past lives.
I’m just back from Huntsville, Alabama, where I had the most wonderful time full of amazing work and friends and lovely times. There’s only one thing that makes me wince, it’s how people in that part of the world — by which I mean the South, generally — take a pretty casual view of waste reduction. Ain’t no giant Zero Waste movement down there, that’s for sure. Takeout can still come in styrofoam containers…
In most of urban Canada, we painstakingly try to avoid being wasteful, to the point of drinking through paper straws, which are objectively disgusting. But despite being environmental do-gooders, here in Ottawa we are astoundingly clueless about how to manage the trash we generate that’s not the recycling or compostable kind. I wrote (another) column in the Ottawa Citizen about the Trail Road dump, which is nearing its capacity, and I am once again asking out loud why the people we pay to solve precisely that problem aren’t able to make the slightest bit of progress on the file.
My tongue-in-cheek proposal is to find buyers for our junk so it can become someone else’s problem — and if you think that’s too zany for words, let me reassure you that it’s actually an option that’s considered except in reverse; to pay someone in the private sector to take it from us. Anyway, read the column for the details… and for a revelation about my past you might find amusing.