Toronto buys into crap on garbage
Toronto city officials are considering some drastic measures to tackle what they see as a crisis of mounting piles of garbage. Reports the Toronto Star:
Proposals being considered for beverage cups, takeout food containers and plastic bags include:
An outright ban.
A levy or tax on the items. (Charging extra would presumably influence consumers to use recyclable cups or containers.)
A deposit-return program similar to the provincial bottle return program, whereby consumers get at least a portion of their money back if they turn in the container, making the seller responsible for recycling it.
A proposal pushed by Councillor Howard Moscoe targets cardboard and plastic store packaging, most of which ends up in the garbage stream. Stores in Toronto should be required to provide space where customers can take their purchases out of the packaging and leave the garbage behind, Moscoe says. This would put pressure on the manufacturers — over whom Toronto has no control — to reduce the amount of packaging on their products.
It’s not hard to see what a headache any combination of these policies would create for most people. And for what? To assuage a fear that the world is drowning in trash.
But then again, some people may go along with such exercises in futility when it’s packaged in green propaganda, as Penn & Teller demonstrated on their Showtime show Bullshit! when they tackled recycling. Posing as local sanitation officials, they tell some unsuspecting citizens that they will need to fill an ever-larger array of color-coded recycling bins — and no one bats an eye.
The 30-minute episode, which features CEI’s Angela Logomasini, is available on YouTube in three parts (thanks to Neil Hrab for the Toronto Star link):