|
by Jay Arthur
Beware Greeks bearing gifts, says the adage. By the same token, we shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Add to this the lack of no-charge midday meals in the real world and the theme of this month's column comes to light.
When the Greeks, gift horses and free lunch offers come from those whose sole motivation is their bottom line and the potential recipients of the gifts live here in British Columbia, they have even more reason to pause.
Two recent reports have confirmed what we already knew. Recovery of recycled beverage containers is way higher when the incentive of a deposit is involved. The second thing we knew but not everyone wanted to admit is that the cost of a deposit-return program can be compared favourably to curbside recycling.
For years we have heard the same old line: hundreds of dollars per tonne to take back the empties to the corner store, less than a hundred dollars per tonne to put them in the blue box. This, to conjure up an image of a container that, thankfully, rarely finds its way into a blue box, is a crock.
Yes, when you compare the cost of taking one pop bottle back to the local Beckers to placing the same bottle in a big city curbside recycling program you can come up with some astronomic figures on the one hand and some pretty low numbers on the other.
Now, just for the fun of it, compare a take-back depot to a rural curbside recycling program and the numbers change dramatically.
And, of course, if we were to add to the equation the cost of the landfilling all those containers which don't get as a far as the blue box the picture changes again.
Moving away from financial cost to environmental cost, there is no contest when you include the containers that get away.
So you have to wonder about these wise men from the East who would suggest the Province of Ontario is a role model for the nation. With recovery rates for containers half of those enjoyed in places like BC, the only model Ontario provides is how NOT to do it.
In the 1980s, the provincial government abandoned its
|
|
