TerraCycle products made from garbage (from left): backpack made from Capri Sun packets; messenger bag made from Oreo wrappers; tote made from potato chip bags.

The Claim

Supporters of “upcycling”— turning garbage into funky purses, photo frames, jewelry, and more—say it’s a great way to minimize what’s going into our mountainous landfills. But just how truly green is this practice?

The Investigation

One company that’s been making waves in the world of upcycling is TerraCycle. Partenered with such big businesses as Kraft, TerraCycle proudly embraces the “eco-capitalism” label.

Currently, it mostly turns unrecyclable drink pouches into backpacks, tote bags, and pencil cases. Since there’s nothing else that can be done with this silver heavy-duty packaging, TerraCycle’s brightly coloured upcycled products are “turning a negative into a positive,” says company spokesperson Brian Young. TerraCycle also donates two cents for every pouch it collects to the charity or school of your choice.

It’s all very warm and fuzzy, so it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger problem: why are we creating so much garbage in the first place?

Then there’s upcycling’s carbon footprint when it’s scaled up. TerraCycle, based in New Jersey, collects juice pouches from across North America and ships them to a variety of manufacturing centres in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and across Asia. The finished products are then shipped back across the continent to big-box retailers.

While TerraCycle does ship by train when possible as part of its plan to minimize its environmental impact, all this continent-crossing leaves the same type of hefty carbon footprint typically associated with any large-scale manufacturer.

To deal with this downside, upcycling should be the purview of local projects, says Jesse Lemieux, a sustainability expert and founder of Pacific Permaculture. He believes that people need to be taught how to deal with the waste in their immediate surroundings, rather than having large companies take care of it for them.

“I appreciate that people are coming up with creative solutions to garbage,” he adds. “There’s more and more of a need for this. But the whole system has to change. Unless we address that, all of this is just a Band-Aid.”

The Verdict

We agree with Lemieux. Upcycling is a symptom, not a cure. While there’s no doubt TerraCycle and other upcyclers are diverting trash from landfills, our real focus—as individuals and as voters— should be less on how to prettify our garbage and more on how to stop creating it. Of the three Rs, “reduce” remains the most important.

Solidarity forever. Or until the litterbox is full. Illustration by David Donald.

It’s hard enough to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort in this world, but to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort and be mildly inconvenienced? It’s too much to bear.

As I write this, Toronto is several weeks’ deep into a civic workers’ strike. The issues on both sides are complex, and neither side, the city nor the union, have behaved with grace or consideration. Swimming pools are closed, city-run daycares are closed, you can’t get a permit of any sort, and nobody is picking up the trash. As someone who hates to swim, has no children, and would need to own a home before I could consider renovating it, the strike means only one thing to me—how long can I get away with not cleaning my cat Poutine’s litterbox? How many little mountains of clumped clay does Poutine have to stumble over before I officially become an animal abuser?

Like most apathetic Torontonians, I figure ignoring the garbage problem is the best solution (actually, sneaking out in the middle of the night and cramming the cat crap into an overflowing street bin is the best solution — illegal, yes, but what are they going to do, get Poutine’s DNA from a turd?). And, like most no-way-would-I-do-that-job Torontonians, I am not unsympathetic toward the “garbage guys” union—at least not until their needs collide with mine.

Like most events in our publicity-mad era, the stalemate between the city and outside workers is really a battle over good versus less-good PR. The clever people signing the cheques at Toronto City Hall well know that the public employees’ union can’t muster the same sentimental attachment to waste management as their brother unions can to policing or firefighting. Firefighters have cute dogs, for god’s sake! And cops are sexy. Garbage guys have no adorable mascots and wear baggy uniforms that are about as sexy as wet tarps.

Nobody grows up wanting to be a garbage collector. No heroic texts sing of triumphs in trash removal, and there are no long-running television dramas examining the soul-destruction endured by people who empty recycling bins. No one has ever run into a burning building to save bundles of old newspapers. Thus, the city can hold out as long as it likes, because there is no glamour in rubbish.

I will admit to having impure thoughts about my local litter wranglers of late, and I am not talking about wondering what’s under their oilcloths. The first week into the strike, I caught myself thinking such unprogressive, uncharitable thoughts as, “I have never been in a union of any kind, so I wouldn’t know a banked sick day from a snow day,” or, “I went to school for six years, and I still make less than my local scullery lout, the guy who always chucks my empty green bin in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking pedestrians, seniors in walkers, large dogs, and children on trikes.” Shame, you dapple my rainbow.

In week two, I began to question my previously automatic support of unionized labour. Specifically, why do people behave like it’s 1932 whenever they go on strike? As if the diverse world of work today — wherein few people share the same mix of labour, pay, and benefits agreements — can be reduced, when it’s metaphorically convenient for both parties, to “bosses versus workers.” I’ve been my own boss my entire adult life. Who do I get to sing antiquated folk chants to? Where do I file a grievance when my house smells like the dumpster behind the Humane Society?

Now in week three, I don’t care anymore who’s right or who’s a greedy, overprivileged layabout (although I would dearly love to see my local councillor, a do-nothing in the sunniest of times, heaving bags of fetid refuse into the maw of a maggot-encrusted truck, preferably while being pecked by seagulls). I just want to breathe deeply again.

I’m tired of taping aloe-scented antiseptic wipes across the bridge of my nose when I run past the cat’s “go (and go, and go) zone,” through the increasingly dense, bluish mist surrounding the feline rest stop. I’m fed up with feeling surrounded by my own bad habits, by pizza boxes and sour wine bottles, fly-specked candy wrappers and spore-spawning coffee grounds. I’m sick of the dust, the entombing dust, and the raw, sweaty, eye-watering acidity in the air, the farty tang of it all.

If I wanted to wallow in filth, I’d pick up trash for a living.

There are better ways than the scrap heap to deal with an old computer. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user ÇP.

You know it’s wrong to toss your e-waste in the trash but you also know that too often e-waste ends up in a country like India or China, where labourers are exposed to toxic fumes and cancer-causing dioxins as they strip down old electronics, and discarded heavy metals end up contaminating local soil and water.

Unfortunately, there are no national standards for e-waste recyclers, so making sure your old PC isn’t being illegally shipped overseas requires a bit of work on your part. Here are five tips to help you out with that process:

1. Contact your province’s recycling council or your regional district office for a list of recommended recyclers. Bear in mind these recyclers are only “recommendations,” so you’ll have to exercise due diligence. Ask whether they carry an ISO number, which certifies they adhere to internationally recognized business and environmental standards. Also ask how they recycle e-waste. Locally? In what types of facilities? Some recyclers will send components to specialized smelters in Europe, but that’s rare. Any mention of sending e-waste to India, Africa, or China should raise red flags.
2. Find a reputable computer refurbishment centre such as reBOOT or Industry Canada’s Computers for Schools. Both agencies will give new life to your end-of-life hardware and distribute it to a non-profit or charity. You can find your nearest reBOOT or Computers for Schools program on their websites.
3. Living in Western Canada? Then drop off your e-waste at London Drugs. This electronics and pharmacy chain even accepts hardware purchased elsewhere for a nominal fee—$5 for a laptop, $10 for a desktop.
4. Consider returning your hardware to its retailer or manufacturer. Most national electronics retailers use reputable recyclers, as do manufacturers like Dell, Apple, and HP, which all have programs that allow you to mail back discontinued hardware.
5. Here’s one option that’s so easy, it doesn’t even require you to find a recycler: reducing. “Most of us who email and surf the web don’t need anything more powerful than a Pentium III,” says Vancouver reBOOT general manager Robert Gilson. So think twice before you buy your next cellphone or laptop. You’ll do the environment—and your wallet—a favour.

Are reusable menstrual cups really better for the environment than tampons and pads?

The Claim

DivaCup is a reusable, silicone menstrual cup that claims to be an “environmentally responsible” product that is the “most clean and convenient method of feminine hygiene protection.” But how green can the manmade silicone product be?

The Investigation

DivaCup, like other brands of reusable menstrual cups, works by collecting menstrual flow in a small, internally placed cup. This cup is emptied and washed out throughout a woman’s cycle, then sterilized by boiling and put away for next month. According to the makers of DivaCup, which is the only Health Canada approved reusable menstrual cup, one cup will last a woman an entire year (and some users say a cup can be used for much longer), and that, they argue, is one reason why this product is so environmentally friendly.

The company’s clearly onto something. Each year, 12 billion conventional pads and 7 million tampons, made out of plastics, rayon, viscose, and cotton, are dumped into the North American environment. These products have been bleached with chlorine, which releases carcinogenic dioxins into the environment, and most use non-organic cotton, which has been saturated in pesticides and insecticides. Cotton is also considered to be the world’s “thirstiest crop,” requiring six pints of water to grow just one little bud.

While DivaCup is made from silicone, the same synthetic substance found in everything from cosmetics to cars, silicone looks pretty green compared to what goes into conventional menstrual products.

Dr. Michael Brook, a silicone expert at McMaster University, says that because silicone is derived from silica, a type of sand, it will slowly degrade back to that material. “The safety record of silicones is exemplary, and unlike many materials used in commerce, there is a lot of data available to permit such a statement to be made.”

The Verdict:

There’s no “greenwashing” going on here; DivaCup lives up to its claims and truly is a green alternative to conventional feminine hygiene products. While there might be an initial yuck factor, for most women, a reusable menstrual cup is an environmentally and economically healthy choice when dealing with their once-a-month friend.

Toronto's city-worker strike has exposed just how wasteful our lives are. Creative Commons photo by Laurie McGregor.

The buzzword around Toronto for the past two weeks has been “garbage.” The garbage that is pilling up around public canisters into miniature CN Towers. The garbage that is filling parks and arenas a quarter full arousing smells and attracting pests to local neighbors. And the garbage Torontonians left behind after the celebratory mess of the Pride Parade and Canada Day.

Its day 12 of a public workers strike in Toronto and already there are signs of our livable-city utopia coming crashing down as garbage stinks up our homes, city and, apparently, attitudes. Some argue the city is keeping its cool. But like all things under smoldering summer heat, it can only keep so long until it ferments. This summer Torontonians will need to face the problem festering in the bins outside our houses: the enormous amount of waste we make.

According to the Toronto Star, Ontario produces 12.4 million tonnes of garbage annually. That is the equivalent weight of more than 80,000 fully loaded Boeing 707 jetliners. Out of that, only 3 million tonnes—just 20 percent—of garbage is diverted into recycled goods despite our aggressive recycling system. Many Ontario landfills will reach full capacity in less than 20 years.

Much of our waste is plastic water bottles, packaging and coffee cups. In Toronto alone, there are 1 million plastic water bottles discarded daily and another 1 million coffee cups, says the Star.

But we can’t blame Starbucks and the Coca-Cola water brand Dasani for this. We are the consumers creating this waste. And while climate change is the umbrella issue of our time, there are other issues that get veiled over. Like the big smelly elephant in the room that nobody likes talking about – our consumption and the waste that follows it.

As individuals, there are many ways to reduce our trash footprint. Adria Vasil promotes several ways to do this in her EcoHolic column, including: composting, going meat-free, package-free, as well as things we commonly don’t think about—such as separating our condoms and “hygiene products.”

GarbageRevolution.com is a film and website that experiments with keeping one’s garbage for an extended period of time to assess our individual garbage output.

There are plenty of additional ways we can redirect our waste into more useful means outside of dumpsites. Treehugger reports that Broward County, Fla., for example is using garbage as a resource in waste-based energy production, creating alternatives for our energy crisis.  And Houston’s Waste Management will be converting garbage into fuel and electricity with waste gasification in a joint venture with InEnTec, says Kevin Bulls in Technology Review.

There are plenty of ways of slimming down and transforming our waste streams. But the one thing we can’t do is continue to think of garbage as a simple summer inconvenience with the public workers strike.  Otherwise we will literally sink communities and the oceans with our Timmy’s coffee cups. Let’s be bold and face our own stink.

[image source]

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

From Flickr. As the original caption points out, Torontonians will apparently do anything to avoid actually littering.

The phenomenon gets coverage, amongst other places, in this month’s Atlantic. A firm called Positive Energy did a test project in Sacramento in which they sent people power bills with either lots of smiley faces (“you used 58 percent less electricity than your neighbor this month”) … or none (“you used 39 percent more electricity and it cost you $741 more”). This led to a 2 percent reduction in energy usage in the neighborhood, or the equivalent of 700 fewer homes on the grid, according to the Atlantic. That’s a huge reduction for something with few costs and no real drawbacks.

I read the Atlantic article while sitting on the patio of a Starbucks at Bathurst and Bloor on an oppressively hot Toronto evening. Despite the strike, the store had whisked away its trash and worked some of its Starbucks magic to ensure those piles of discarded coffee cups were never seen by its guilt-prone, environment-conscious clientele. In contrast, the public garbage bin outside the store provided stark proof of just how much garbage our city produces. Someone had pried open the taped-up receptacles, but still the bin was full and garbage had spilled onto the street.

Faced with the prospect of littering in front of a patio of onlookers, most people instead shamefacedly tucked their newspapers or water bottles under their arms and kept on walking. Of course, I have no illusions that not throwing that particular piece of garbage into that particular bin made any difference. But I also suspect that the person who carries his trash around for 20 minutes before finding a discreet corner in which to throw it will think twice before buying the next newspaper or water bottle. It’s a rare welcome consequence of the strike that there are no more magical city employees to make our garbage disappear, forcing us to grapple in a very public way with the mess we create.

The problem I have with this new application of social proof theory is the same problem I have with writing blog posts about the environment. It feels a lot like nagging. And no one likes being nagged – especially on an issue like waste production, on which we are all far from perfect. However, at it’s best, the idea is not about creating more shame and self-loathing about the environment, but about turning that shame into something productive. It’s about taking the same competitive instinct that makes us mow our lawns or get our kids haircuts and using it to help our world.

This morning when I realized my garbage can was getting full, I thought, “Ugh, what if the strike drags on and these bags start to pile up in front of my apartment. That will be embarrassing.” And then I thought, maybe I’ll take that extra 10 minutes and bring my mug and use some Tupperware today. Not that I think it will save the world – too grand a goal for a Thursday morning – but it will help save face. It may not have been the noblest thing I’ve done all week, but it just might be the best.

One way the region could help divert more waste is by insisting that its commercial and industrial taxpayers start recycling, just as residents have done for years. After all, it’s the out-of-town visitors, and the businesses that cater to them, that are creating the garbage problem. Fewer than three percent of hotels offer recycling bins to their guests and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single bin in busy tourist districts or parks. One of the main reasons for this is that while residents pay for recycling pick-up as part of their municipal taxes, most businesses do not and must pay out of pocket for the service. “We don’t really recycle at all, and I don’t have time for this,” says Frank Taylor, general manager of the Best Western Fallsview, echoing the sentiments of many business owners when asked about their recycling habits.

Whether they wish to or not, all Ontario businesses have been legally obliged to recycle since 1994. But without any follow-through from the proper authorities, it’s been left up to businesses to decide whether to bother. “The Ministry of the Environment is simply not enforcing the regulation because, right now, it doesn’t see it as a priority,” says David McRobert, senior legal counsel to the province’s environmental commissioner.

“We are aware that this is an issue that isn’t being addressed, and we need to have a look at enforcing the recycling regulations,” says Arthur Chamberlain, a spokesperson for Ontario’s minister of the environment. He says the ministry is looking into the possibility of conducting recycling audits of businesses to make them more accountable.

But when that will happen is anyone’s guess. And the outcome may be too late to make a difference. “This is happening all over the place, not just in Niagara Falls. I think we have squeezed all the recycling we can out of city residents,” says Gord Perks of the Toronto Environmental Alliance, who is well aware of the one-sided recycling situation. “It’s time to make the big guys do it. Without big change now, everyone is going to suffer in the long run.”