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With record heat waves, droughts and forest fires raging once again here in B.C. and across Canada, it’s clear that climate change is occurring, and its existence has nothing to do with one’s political beliefs.
So, what can we do to help mitigate the effects and lessen the burden for future generations?
Recycling is one thing that is relatively easy and can greatly reduce our carbon footprint. While recycling in BC has come a long way in recent years, there is still a lot more we could be doing to reduce our waste stream.
Take for example municipal curbside garbage and recycling collection. It’s very convenient and undoubtedly a lot of people recycle more now than they did before the program started.
And yet this program could even be more effective if there were stronger incentives for those people who are not participating. For example, one family in Prince George might have the smallest garbage can the city offers and still doesn’t even fill it up every week because they’re taking full advantage of curbside recycling…
While another family right next door might have the extra large garbage can, completely fills it up every week and barely uses their blue recycling boxes.
This doesn’t really seem fair and it’s certainly not cost-effective. That’s why cities like Prince George and Recycle BC should be taking further steps to motivate everyone to recycle more.
For example, in some jurisdictions around the world you can only use a municipal designated garbage bag that people have to pay for.
Even at a small cost, like 50 cents a bag, citizens don’t want to buy extra garbage bags and are motivated to use existing recycling programs. In some places there are random garbage audits and if, for example, paper envelopes with an address on them are found in a garbage bag, that household gets charged a financial penalty for not recycling paper.
Additional incentives like these have proven to be extremely effective in achieving higher participation rates… So we should be considering ideas like these at the provincial and municipal level to reduce our waste stream and at the same time save local taxpayers a lot of money we currently spend on managing garbage.
So, this is it for the first year of the Northern View. Thank you so much for watching, have a great summer, and I’ll see you again in the Fall.
Editors note: The views expressed in this column do not necessarily represent the views of Pattison Media.
