Waste Segregation: A Priority Among Others
Waste is an inevitable part of society. In almost every activity, may it be eating a snack bought at the school cafeteria or buying a drink from a vending machine, we produce waste. “Since it is considered inevitable, why bother with it,” you might say. Our day-to-day needs and wants typically incur not only costs of our pockets but also costs of nature.
The protein bar that costs you three dollars and twenty-five cents each morning because you are unable to eat breakfast at home also incurs a cost of ten to twenty years of your life to decompose. Your favourite bottled juice that you always buy from the vending machine may conveniently meet your immediate thirst every lunchtime; You think to yourself: “It’s okay, this can be recycled,” while you gulp it down. Contrary to the safe and positive note the word “recycling” makes you feel it is, however, not as easy as it sounds. Although recycling makes us feel good and responsible to humans, it can be a fairly long process. “It’s not like you put it in your bin and suddenly it’s a new thing,” says Sims Municipal Recycling, a New York-based company owned by Sims Metal Management (Winter, 2015, para. 7). Recycling is an elaborate global system within which its plastic is sold, shipped, melted, resold, and shipped again—sometimes zigzagging the globe before becoming a carpet, clothing, or repeating life as a bottle (para. 1). The process of recycling may be more complex than it sounds but we can make it easier if we know our local recycling rules and if we apply the 4Rs (i.e., refuse, reduce, reuse, repair) before the recycling part. However, this may be far from reality when the need to promote waste segregation comes first as a priority in Vanier College because of the concerning percentage of collected unsegregated waste.
From the 2021 Waste Characterization of Vanier Sustainability, it is found that 65% of Vanier’s waste could be recycled or composted, which is equivalent to 34 tons of waste per year that could be diverted from the landfill. Speaking of which, Canada is home to 3000 municipal landfills and 270 of which are open large landfills that have the capacity to carry 100,000 tonnes of waste (Environment and Climate Change Canada, 2021, p. 3). In 2019, these large landfills were responsible for over 85% or 18 Megatons (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2 eq). Consequently, Vanier Sustainability’s result of 65% waste that could have been recycled or composted also corresponds to 70 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2 eq). This could have been prevented by sorting the trash in school. The existence of the recent ‘Waste Reduction Challenge’ by Vanier Sustainability not only resonates with the need of the Vanier community to decrease its waste production but primarily calls for our individual responsibility to segregate our trash since most of the activity done by the Vanier sustainability members and volunteers is waste sorting or the process of separating waste types after dumping or collection. In knowing how to differentiate between waste types and applying this knowledge in school, Vanier students could lessen the amount of work and time for Vanier Sustainability to sort out all the waste collected, and in turn, guide to the realization of other potential waste concerns in Vanier college such as helping to break down and improve the recycling process among others.
References:
Environment and Climate Change Canada. (2021). Reducing methane emissions from Canada’s municipal solid waste landfills. https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ eccc/documents/pdf/cepa/2022reducingmethaneDD-eng.pdf
Winter, D. (2015, December 4). The Violent Afterlife of a Recycled Plastic Bottle. The Atlantic.https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/what-actually-happens-to-a-recycled-plastic-bottle/418326/
By: Hyacinth B. Domingo
