Garbage. Garbage. Garbage. Some weeks it just seems to build up to ginormous propotions!
Seriously, we do talk a lot about garbage around here. And we’re not the only ones.
Waste disposal has been an ongoing nightmare in some places. Metro Vancouver’s woes don’t even come close to Italy’s decades-old mountains of garbage around Naples, “City of Trash”. Or Bangalore, India. Or several other countries.
We are far from perfect here in Canada, or in BC, in respects to the way we dispose of our trash, but it’s not bad it’s and getting better.
Despite all the criticism directed at the Cache Creek Landfill, it’s one of the best. Part of that reason is because of the criticism - it keeps the operators on their toes.
But then, Belkorp keeps coming up with new ideas (new to us) on how to manage what’s already been tossed in the garbage.
In a perfect situation, there would be no garbage. No automobiles rusting in a field, no floating islands of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, no need for landfills.
But even the ancient cities had their garbage dumps, and museums across the world are filled with their contents.
The world is evolving slowly in some aspects, and coming to terms with garbage is, unfortunately, one of them. More people, more garbage - and 99.9 per cent of it wouldn’t be suitable for anyone’s museum.
Any method we use to dispose of it is going to have an effect on the planet and on us - earth, water, air.
Belkorp, which owns Wastech, is proposing to build material recycling and recovery facilities in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley. Unlike the “blue bag takes all” method we’ve gotten used to, workers at these facilities will sort the tossed materials and send them off for recycling.
It’s been slow in developing, but there can be profit in recycling. Like everything, it needs infrastructure in place that will take it from A-Z. We’re getting closer to Z.
Let’s just hope that it’s not too late for the planet.
Wendy Coomber is editor of the Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal