Five cent fine on wastrels the first step in a social change marathon

Wannabe environmentalists such as I, who are tempted to celebrate Loblaw’s announcement this week that it will charge shoppers five cents per plastic bag, may have to put the bubbly back in the fridge.

I know that corporations in general are worse polluters than consumers, but there’s a difference between landfill litter and other weapons in the polluter’s armoury. The City of Toronto told me on Wednesday that shopping bags akin to Loblaws’ make up only a proportion of one type of litter collected from the streets of Toronto, which in turn accounts for only 27 per cent of annual Toronto litter.

I shouldn’t disparage the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee though. With 44,000 cubic metres of landfill-bound rubbish yearly, it has – literally – a mountain to climb, albeit an underground one. Unfortunately the real culprits, all 3,000,000+ of them, are much closer to home. Actually, they’re in the home – mine and everyone else’s in the GTA. The majority of that 27 per cent is from a grubby smorgasbord of retail and non-retail items that, when put together, spell fast food packaging. What annoys me even more is that a significant proportion of them are plastic bottles and jars that could have been recycled, if the previous owner had managed to carry them that marathon distance to the nearest garbage bin, and mustered the staggering concentration required to pick the correct hole of the three. As I discovered, once whatever-it-is hits the street, then the city has to regard it as “contaminated,” and it goes the way of the bubblegum and everything else.

Thus I don’t make myself very popular giving people the ‘hairy eyeball’ when they grumble that there’s no school close enough to them for their first-born, that the ambulance should have arrived one minute sooner, or that there’s a massive power outage on the West side of Toronto. I just quietly wonder how many schools, hospitals, or power stations could be bought with the $20,000,000 that the city wastes every year clearing up after Torontonians.