waste

This is simply a tragedy. Well, maybe more of an inconvenience.

My bike’s derailleur apparently fell off while I was riding home the other night, about 2 kilometers from home, so I simply sat on the bike, and kicked off of the curb with one leg the rest of the way (like skateboarding). It is being fixed by Canadian Tire, but to be honest, I am getting sick and Canadian Tired of my bikes needing fixing shortly after I get them.

Two things. First, I wanted to share this link I found of bike usage in Copenhagen. Crazy!

I wanted to take this opportunity to post some images of my ride home, at 3am or thereabouts. They are mostly shots of trash that I am overrun by on the streets. For some reason, I have to dodge endless trails of plastic water bottles, Tim Horton’s cups, and aluminum cans. What this tells me is that the main thing people like to throw out of their cars is drinking containers. Any thoughts on this? The only good use for plastic bottles is this idea I stumbled upon during my daily blog-reading routine.

Here are the photos: enjoy!

I think it’s funny that I was able to make the changes from strapping my huge doctor’s satchel to my bike rack with a 1/4″ cable used for electric instruments. How indie/rock can bike riding get?  Also, the image of me above, riding with headphones, was discouraged recently by someone looking out for my safety, but you must understand that I LIVE  music. I do nothing BUT listen to music at work, so when I ride, I listen to talk-radio podcasts, so the five cars that pass me on my 10km-ride are heard from a mile away.

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I am dumbfounded. I’ll tell you why in a paragraph or two.

Listen, I will not pretend to know what is going on in Canadian politics. It is one of the priorities on my list.

Why? You may ask that for good reason. Well, I just like to know when someone is lying to me. I like being able to call “bullshit” when someone in the political spectrum , or someone speaking for one of those boobs, says something completely outrageous. I don’t like hearing things, and gobbling them up like a nice little consumer. I like to know the details.

For starters, our robotic, yet intelligent, Prime Minister of horse-puckey has made a move that I am FINALLY impressed with. He stated today that under the current definitions and rules around saying food in Canada is “Made in Canada” there are problems… As of right now, if 51% of the work being done to prepare food, and make it consumer-ready is done in Canada, companies are legally allowed to say Made in Canada. Which is a stretch, to say the least…I think we’ll all agree.

“Hey gringo, these bananas were grown in Canada…well, that’s not entirely true. You see, we grew them in South America and then they were juggled and handled and banged around vociferously in some shit-hole cannery plant in Ontario, so technically, they’re Canadian…right?”

No. I want to know where my food is grown, prepared, and “managed”.

Stephen Harper has made a promise, of sorts, to adjust this rule, so the definition is less clandestine and malleable to make sense to only those who work in the industry. Food must be grown and prepared fully in Canada to have the label Made in Canada. If it isn’t, it must say where the other “components” (a fruit salad mix, I guess?) are from.

I just love how Harper said something along the lines of, “It’s what Canadians want, so we have to provide it,” as if this dude gives one ounce of care what “Canadians want”. I digress. I must tip my cap to the man who I know to be intelligent and otherwise incompetent. He made good with me on this story.

And in other “news” The Globe and Mail has FINALLY decided to write about The North Pacific Garbage Patch! Holy geez! Someone at Phog told me that I would be happy that it was finally being covered. While reading the piece, I was floored, yet not surprised (we have a Conservative government) to read this admission from Diane Lake, a spokeswoman with the Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. She “said that while the ministry is aware of the North Pacific Gyre, it is conducting no real research on the extent or effects of the plastic pollution.” Perfect. Nice work Diane. Nice to see you give a shit. You know, Canada has a border that kinda touches the Pacific Ocean. Hey wait! That’s one of the words in the North Pacific Garbage Patch! Come to think of it, we’re North too…but, we don’t really need to be studying this. You know, it’ll all go away, like climate change, and racism, and mental illness, and corporatocracy raping us from dusk till dawn…yeah, someone else is taking care of it, I’m sure.

Here’s a shortlist, from The Globe and Mail, of what Captain Moore has been finding: A trail of Taco Bell wrappers, Dolls and action figures, Umbrellas, Tarps, Bottles, Tofu containers(for those of you who think you’re saving the earth with tofu. Maybe we need to be writing letters to tofu companies asking them to consider new packaging?), Lego, Grocery bags, Foam coffee cups, Checkers, Furniture, Toothbrushes, Cigarette lighters, Syringes, Rubber ducks, Basketball shoes

See, this is exactly the kind of thing that should make backbones stiffen. It should make you, reading this, totally annoyed with the laissez faire attitude of people who are paid by us to work for us. These are the issues that will be affecting your family’s family’s family. But what can we do besides thinking globally and acting locally? I’m actually shocked that the fishing industry in the west hasn’t pulled a page from the Argentinian farmers’ handbook.

Get angry at this lack of interest in your job, your industry, and your culturally significant knowledge. Stop fishing until the Department of Fisheries and Oceans decides to look into stemming this abuse in the oceans, and possibly even going so far as to suggesting that maybe we are drowning in our own plastic…and that we should step back from it…sloooowly…with biiiiig steps.

I must also place this in here…as I was listening to Q on CBC with Jian Ghomeshi, I heard the guest talking about food, and mentioning our good friend Michael Pollan. It was “Montreal writer Taras Grescoe on the search for ethical seafood” talking about his new book, Bottomfeeder. I kind of want to read this now. The “Q on CBC” in the first sentence of this paragraph is a direct link to the podcast of this show. It was a GREAT interview, worth listening to…

I bit off more than I could chew. Now I want to get into the whole argument we had at Phog last night…about bananas, how we won’t be eating yellow ones in 5 years, and about the plague/waste of sandwich (Ziploc) bags.

Another time.

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This is one of those stories that has caught me off guard to the degree that I wonder why newspaper editors even wake up in the morning. This story is so profoundly indicative of what is to come, that I cannot understand the lack of attention being given to it!

Naples. Yes, the one in Italy associated with beauty and culture. Well, they have not had their garbage collected SINCE DECEMBER of 2007!!!!!!

Think right now for a second about how bad your streets/lawn would look if the entire city’s garbage wasn’t picked up for 6 months. Holy Jesus! What kind of strike would lead to this kind of unsolved dispute? There was no strike. The city simply ran out of room in the landfills. There are no legal dumps open at all in all of Naples! They have filled the dumps!

Again, this is one of those issues we sweep under the rug (the topsoil) in our daily lives. We just put these bags of refuse out to the curb and they magically disappear in the morning on “garbage day”. There is really no responsibility for people who abuse the system and refuse to recycle, or who just consume at such an incredible rate, that they leave 10 bags of garbage to be picked up per week. I often see houses on garbage eve, with up to 15 bags of garbage waiting to be heaved into a hole in the earth at the outskirts of town. I almost always end up shaking my head, lost for expression.

You see, I bust my hump to recycle and limit my trash output, and when I see a repeat-offending trash hoarder unloading a lifetime of garbage EVERY WEEK, I get a little miffed.

And I wonder, in Naples, if these people are starting to USE LESS! If you look a the pictures in the stories attached, you can see the plethora of stink left rotting in parking lots, streets, and yards. How has this not sparked HUGE health issues in the area? How has this story been untold to the masses as a warning of what can happen when you haphazardly toss away belongings like nothing matters at the end of this process?

I have always wondered how my neighbours (over the years) cannot realize how profound the imbalance is between the output of trash from themselves and the people living next to them. All I can say, really, is that if I put 6 bags of garbage out every week, and my neighbour put out 4 bags per month, and some weeks putting out nothing at all, I know I would wonder how the hell they do it. Lugging filth the curb is work. It’s almost too much work for our society’s most active, to haul out bags of garbage. But what this kind of trash output tells me is that the lack of awareness of the impact of trash on our city, environment, watershed, etc. makes it insatiable to citizens. There is no end in sight for the long line of garbage when no one is held accountable for the amount they waste.

I heard a conversation at the bar recently, where the discussion weaved into the possibility of paying for trash output. Citizens pay for the amount of bags (over the allotted amount) they require relief of, and if they stay under the limit, they pay nothing extra. Taxes take care of the minimum allotted amount. I love this idea. The only people who don’t like it seem to be those who are unable to put a little thought into the products they buy, maybe reducing output by buying things with less packaging.

If these kinds of garbage crises are going to “surface” in other cities, you can bet your bottom that people are going to pay.

I just wanted to share this with all of you, and maybe spark the question about how much we throw away. How much waste are you making? Do you rely on the magic of disappearing curb garbage fairies every week a little too much? Could you be easing the strain on your landfill?

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