Montreal City Weblog

Kate 22:16 on 2020-11-10 Permalink Reply  

• Su 08:21 on 2020-11-11 Permalink

  So what I understand from this article and others . The management company bailed out ( notified the city last year), because demand for recycled paper is down, and hence unprofitable. The company promised to stay on until another manager could be found. While still under contract,they did not bother to install the brand new high tech glass sorting machine leading to a mountainous backlog of tons of glass! The new manager is promising to install the thing.
  Also it turns out according to a specialist in waste and recycling that the level of contamination in our bailed and sorted paper waste ( used snot rags, plasticised material used napkins and more) is at 17% when the mainly overseas companies purchasing it now demand 2% purity.
  The .municipal opposition blames the current administration for this.

  REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE

• Kate 09:30 on 2020-11-11 Permalink

  The authorities have probably concluded that we’re not ready to sort our recycling more intelligently, which we would need to do to make the end product saleable. I’m not even saying they’re mistaken – there may be a limit to how much interest they can make people take in their trash. I don’t know what the good answer is.

• DeWolf 12:15 on 2020-11-11 Permalink

  This would take a huge adjustment in habits and attitudes, but one of the reasons other countries manage to recycle so much more of their waste is because people are expected to take a bit more responsibility for their trash. In many parts of Europe, there’s no household pickup – you need to take your garbage down the street to a depot where you can sort it out into specific bins. In Taiwan, people sort their trash and wait outside their homes for the garbage truck to arrive. (It plays a jingle as it goes down the street, like an ice cream truck.) If they leave their garbage unattended, it won’t be picked up. And this is in a country where people work extremely long hours. It’s a fairly recent turn of events, too – 25 years ago, Taiwan had very poor recycling rates and a similar system to what we have here.

• Michael Black 13:00 on 2020-11-11 Permalink

  I commented previously on the evolution of recycling on the island. Are we better off with less being recycled, but more of that being pure, or a lot more being “recycled” but it going to waste because of contamination?

  Maybe there shouod be a drop back to where more was expected of people, and let that rebalance before going back to wider collection.

  Sometimes it’s not even the people at home. I brought in the recycling.bin last week, and there was an unfinished coffee in it, I assume from the workers next door. If random people think it’s okay, then tyere’s not much hope.