Category Archives: economy

Insert “Garbage” Pun Here

economy, food, toronto

A company with a chronic deficit solves nothing by taking out a loan. Likewise, Toronto did not solve her garbage problem yesterday. Toronto’s purchase of the deceptively-named Green Lane Environmental Ltd. (say, didn’t we used to call those things garbage dumps?) is the purchase of a little more time, nothing else.

How much time? About twenty years. How much time has it taken us to find this dump? About twenty years. And the next one will take even longer.

We’re the only species on this planet that makes true waste — as in, something that doesn’t go on to become food for something else. Looking at it that way, waste is economic inefficiency. Waste is lost profit. The only true solution to our waste problem is to eliminate waste altogether.

I know, sounds crazy, right? It’s not. In the past three years alone, Toronto has reduced the number of trucks we send to Michigan from 143 a day to 80. (And no, we didn’t just get bigger trucks.) We’ve done that by diverting recyclables and organics, and that’s just the tip of the (melting) iceberg. The real magic happens when you start using materials in continuous cycles.

Take the beer store, for example. They get back and reuse 96% of the bottles they sell! Ontario’s announcement that they’ll start doing this with LCBO products as well is a huge step in the right direction. Just think, if hungover people have the wherewithal to return bottles, how much more could we do with the packaging of non-intoxicating products?!

The bottom line is that we need to stop subsidizing waste, and start making manufacturers responsible for their own products. Author Paul Hawken often writes about having three categories of waste:

  1. Consumables. Anything that can biodegrade completely and harmlessly. That includes clothes (assuming we stop putting other weird stuff in them) and food (assuming we stop spraying them with toxic pesticides).
  2. Products of service, like cars, TVs and refrigerators would be “leased” to the customer, ultimately to be returned to the manufacturer who would be responsible for the product’s recycling or reuse.
  3. Unmarkatables. This is the nasty stuff, like radioactive isotopes, toxins, and chemicals that bioaccumulate (build-up) in your body. Manufacturers really shouldn’t be producing these things at all, but if they do, they’ll pay to have them stored in “parking lots” until they can figure out how to neutralize them.

So, you can either make products that are 100% biodegradable, figure out how to reuse the parts, or pay the government to store your waste for you.

Anyone who thinks waste reduction, and ultimately elimination, isn’t realistic, should ask themselves one question. How realistic is the idea that we can just keep finding new dumps forever? (To say nothing of all the virgin materials we keep extracting unnecessarily.)

We need to start now, so that by the time this dump is full we won’t have to go looking for another one. Let’s not waste the next twenty years. (Ah ha! There’s the pun I was looking for.)

ps. By the way, this new dump is located in some of Ontario’s (and therefore, Toronto’s) prime agricultural land. As our garbage starts to break down it will leach into the earth that grows our food. The phrase “don’t shit where you eat” comes to mind.

Economy, Environment, Health

ecology, economy, health, polls

Those are the three most important issues for Canadians, in that order, according to a poll released yesterday. The status-quo parties are still treating them as three separate issues, but we know better. You can’t have a healthy economy without a healthy environment, and you can’t have healthy Canadians on a sick planet.

“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.” – Herman Daly, Former Senior Economist, World Bank

That’s good news for the Green Party, because we’re the only ones who can speak with credibility on all three of those issues, and how they relate to each other.

“The emergence of Stéphane Dion as the ecological conscience of the Liberal leadership campaign and the advent of Elizabeth May as leader of the Green Party, are blowing away the NDP’s chances of portraying itself as the champion of the environment.” Chantal Hébert, The Toronto Star, Sept. 13, 2006.

Our current economy is designed to use up our resources as quickly as possible. As long as we believe that “economic growth” can continue as it has for only the past millisecond of our existence, we will fail. We need to transform our economy.

Our environment is in trouble. A full two-thirds of the systems that support life on this planet are in decline. As long as environmental policies are focused exclusively on “spending money” on the environment and regulating against misaligned economic indicators, they will fail. We need to transform our outlook.

Our health system is sick. From childhood asthma in the young to a cancer epidemic in the increasingly young, costs of all kinds are rising. As long as we think we can fix our heath care system by increasing its funding in perpetuity, as we get sicker and sicker, we will fail. We need to transform the way we think about health.

Canadians are smart people, and have their priorities right. Now we’ve just got to vote like it.

The Globe Spins Around

economy, trade

Want to read something strange? Pick up a copy of today’s Globe And Mail and check out the editorial titled The unwelcome landing of another U.S. penalty. The Globe is now “appalled” at how NAFTA is working (or, rather, not working) for our country:

Not again…What are the Americans doing? … Canada cannot win … This is appalling. Whatever happened to the consultations that NAFTA was supposed to foster? … [This] is a terrible way to treat a neighbour.

Uh, yeah, ok. Except that earlier this week the Globe said that Elizabeth May was “off to a bad start” for making the “extreme” suggestion “that the North American free-trade agreement is not working.” Instead, the Globe said, Elizabeth should be focusing on “real issues.”

How do we reconcile this apparent contradiction? Obviously, the only possible conclusion is that Elizabeth, myself, and at least three other letter writers have managed to sway the Globe’s editorial board in less than a week. Good for us.

Maybe stage four will come sooner than we thought.

Letters to the Editor

economy, trade

The first time I ever wrote a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail it was published. I think I’m being rightfully punished for that, because they haven’t printed one since. Yesterday’s letter makes the score 1 for 4, but that’s ok, because here are three great letters they printed instead.

The Globe defends Chapter 11 of the North American free-trade agreement by saying that only two cases were lost by the Canadian government in response to corporate lawsuits. It is not the quantity of cases but the effect of the cases that is important.

One case the government lost concerned a gasoline additive banned in California. When the Canadian government came to the same conclusion as the California Environmental Protection Agency and decided to ban the additive, a U.S. company sued Canada for loss of revenue and won.

This one case has had a chilling effect on future regulation and makes the government think twice about banning toxic substances.
MURRAY MARTIN, Burnaby, B.C.

—
“Almost 85 per cent of our merchandise exports go to our NAFTA partners,” you say. If you think that’s a good thing, I’d shudder to hear what you think is a bad thing.
CHARLES MARKER, Toronto

—
Re Elizabeth May, Off To A Bad Start? (Aug. 29): You no sooner get elected to the leadership of a marginal political party and the leading newspaper in the country leaps to the attack. Seems like a pretty good start to me.
CHRIS MARSTON, Toronto