Yeah, I know, I'm always the last person to know about anything around here:

"With the reduction to one bag of garbage for collection beginning January 1, 2008, the Committee stresses the importance of increasing household recycling as much material as possible."
[ South Bruce Peninsula Crier ]

One bag!! Ok, I'm in, jolly good and about time and all that, and while I do wonder now if I am going to be graciously awarded a retro-active eco-heroes-reel of free tag tickets for my exemplary history of tossing only one bag (for a family of five) for as far back as I can remember, I am nonetheless also kinda keen to know just what sort of committee/person would shoot to roll out such a grand 50% cut waste-trimming rule on the very morning after one of the biggest party-dates on the anglo-saxon/germanic calendar!! I mean, really, how cruel is that?

According to the release, the brilliance of this committee resides in one or more of Councillor Wray Lamont, Councillor Dan Kerr, Robert Woolvett and Brad Burnett, so I do hope one or more of them will step in here, all in the name of their "paramount to the success" public education campaign and maybe just share with us just a little on the why of this sudden plan, and maybe also how they plan to roll out the blitzkrieg public education requisite for reforming our trash habits and maybe even achieving this noble goal ... in just 40 days.

Personally, I'm still housing the unaccepted abomination of corrugated cardboard boxes from last Christmas, still sitting on that stack of leaves that couldn't go into the Nov 3rd pickup because the trees weren't done with them yet, and still completely unclear as to what jugs will vanish Monday mornings and which of them will be surreptitiously dumped back in my bin after the trucks have passed, and that is perhaps a good segue into an anecdote of maybe some pertinence, and it goes like this:

Some years ago, Toronto initiated a massive public-ed campaign to encourage composting. They provided people with free composters, put up posters, and people took the bins because they were free and gung-ho they started filling them up with their trash.

The program was a massive success: Rats came from miles around to feast on the improperly aerated morsels!!

You see, its one thing to reduce the tonnage bound for the landfill, but it is quite another if all that you really accomplish is the stealth storage of all that material elsewhere in the town -- it has to be a real reduction in consumer waste, or we go right back to the Middle Ages and the whole reason we took to community landfills in the first place.

i.e. Rats

Now, how can we do all that? I mean, how can we realistically expect to reduce all the garbage that we culturally produce? I've been pondering that question for a long time and sure as you're born I'm no $200/hr big-city consulting agent, but nonethematter, here's my short strategists list points minimal to achieving any real Western Civilized Eco-footprint goals; you can tell me what you think in the comments, but I would put my PowerPoint list as thus:

1. First and foremost, a swift lobby to legislate all manufacturers and distributors of any goods must be required by law to accept the return of all packaging from those goods. No exceptions, from the corner deli to that brand new flatpanel, if they sell it and it comes wrapped, you can return the wrapping to them, free. Pipe it right back up the pipeline that brought it -- Brewers Retail has already proven to the entire world that this idea has merit and is just good business sense (because they have to come back to your shop to do it!), and the eco-footprint return on the investment is dramatic, immediate and permanent. Packaging returns, what could be simpler?

   A corollary Step-2: the goods themselves, if not consumable, where ever possible, must be returnable. We have today more metal existing above ground than is estimated to be in the mines beneath North America, so why are we still strip mining copper? If our cellphones and computers were required to live to this rule, you'd not be reading this site right now, you couldn't afford the box to get here, and even if you could, you'd be unable to tell anyone more than a yardfence away :) You sell it, you take the trash is also pretty straightforward common-sense, no?

2. a close second: Avoid plastic and again, it's simple, so very very simple. Why do we have a school function hosted on plastic plates? I mean, education should start somewhere and it is best to instill new habits in the newer people, and let them nag the old dogs. You see, the problem is, paper and wood and metal are problems enough but plastic is forever; even if you remould it a few times, each time pouring more guck into the eco-systems, eventually you still get stuck with an inert and incorruptible mass of goo and someone is going to be asked to shack up with it.

   I think it is ironic and would be hilarious were it not so tragic that we have such an obsession with wrapping our foodstuffs in plastic because we fear bacterial poisons and that neurosis now brings us face to face with toxic effects of aging plastics. Wax paper is really quite sufficient, given some simple care and common sense, and especially given what we now know and possess regarding anti-bacterial strategies.

3. Compost is not for dummies. Yes you can home-compost, if you have sufficient yard space, sufficient time for the bother, sufficient need for the end-product, but other municipalities have noticed that compost is valuable and they have done the cooperative community thing, invested in some trained competence and appropriate gear (and about ten million worms) and that turns garbage into gold.

4. lastly, and yes, my steplist to Refuse Utopia is really that short, we need to just consume less. It's not solving problems to hand our gear to someone else and then go buy another, that just shifts the landfill to someone else's backyard. I know it can be hard to pass it up, but this is survival -- we have to send a message back to industry to say that if they want to keep their jobs, we ain't gonna buy until they start thinking like Nature in the whole-ecology design science of their goods, they have to start considering product life-cycles that go all the way around; Nature always co-considers a Death with every new birth, and we need to give pause to that self-same with every time we plunk down the plastic card to buy, rent or lease. If it ain't good sense, don't do it -- your grandmother could tell you that.

   No, this isn't sky-pie sci-fi. Nature can produce spider silk that can lift railway cars, bones and skin are commonplace, and as every archaeologist well knows, none of those things pollutes, none of them persist, and none of them becomes any kind of toxic problem for the creatures that use them or their neighbours. Sure, give me your Nth Generation 50-terrabyte iGot-1 II, but just aim to ensure there's no part of any of it that will be sitting around here 50 years from now; it's not so hard, provided it is in the corporate agenda to be so, and not like, say, some manufacturers we know.

As you can see, that's some education campaign, and some pretty tall orders, but I really don't see where any other scheme is really going to put a stop to our obsession with ripping pretty packages. Return, re-wrap, re-group and refuse! -- ok, there's probably a slicker slogan out there somewhere, but the real point is that we never thought we would see a free South Africa either, even Martin Luther King sat in his cell thinking mere words could do nothing until he heard that the schoolchildren were amassing to face the attack dogs for a second time ... Change can happen, all it takes is the action to do it.