Inside our ineffective recycling system
MOST CANADIANS know the ritual: check the pick-up schedule, sort the waste items, clean the jars, make sure the junk mail isn’t stained with coffee grounds. Then fill up the blue box (or blue bag, or blue cart, depending on the city), and on the appointed day, haul it to the curb. It’s an activity that Canadians have participated in eagerly for almost thirty years. Of the three Rs drilled into our heads in school — reduce, reuse, recycle — recycling is the only one that most of us regularly practise. In 2011, according to a survey by Stewardship Ontario, three-quarters of Ontarians considered the weekly act of sorting and disposing as their “primary environmental effort.”
But as much as Canadians love the blue box, “its role in [our] hearts and minds . . . is much larger than its actual environmental impact,” wrote Dianne Saxe, Ontario’s environmental commissioner, in a report last October. In fact, recycling is one of the least environmentally friendly “environ mental” things one can do.
この記事は The Walrus の September 2018 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The Walrus の September 2018 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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MY GUILTY PLEASURE
I WAS AS SURPRISED as anyone when I became obsessed with comics again last year, at the advanced age of forty-five. As a kid, I loved reading G.I. Joe and The Amazing Spider-Man.
The Upside-Down Book
In her new novel, Rachel Cusk makes the case for becoming a stranger to yourself
Pick a Colour
BACK HERE, I can hear a group of women trickle in. Filling the floor with giggles and voices.
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The Briefcase
What I learned about being a writer from trying to finish a dead man's book
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Blood Language
Menstruation ties us to the land in ways we've all but forgotten
Dream Machines
The real threat with artificial intelligence is that we'll fall prey to its hype
Invisible Lives
Without immigration status, Canada's undocumented youth stay in the shadows
My Guilty Pleasure
"The late nights are mine alone, and I'll spend them however I damn well please"
