DOA: The Blue Box Blunder

In College I was known as the "Eviro Man" and in my third year, we created SAKE, Students Against Killing the Environment. The 3R's were being praised as our new economic hope for the future. Fast forward. After almost 20 years of failed progress in mass recycling, we still have no real advancement in how we create economic development from such programs. It's now 2009 smack dab in the middle of the worse economic crises since the great depression and common sense is only now finally telling us that recycling and the blue box program is a big blue box blunder. After years and years of forcing people to recycle, we have not yet established a viable market for the recycled waste. For example, in Calgary, the last major city to adopt the blue box program, sent all of the glass it collected straight to their landfill where it's piling up waiting for a buyer. Germany has stockpiled millions of tonnes of recyclable plastics in rural fields, like above-ground dumps. San Fransico recently calculated it paid $4,000 a tonne to recycle plastic bags for a resale price of only $32. Think of the wasted fuel, costs of the trucks, the salaries of collectors and the millions of ongoing administrative costs with still no established market. The promise of environmentalists of a "flourishing recycling market" where reused goods would find ready buyers was already a dream even 40 years ago and is, unfortunately, still a dream. Ironically, in 2002, Swedan's leading envionmental authorities reported that most materials be incincerated at waste-to-energy plants, which is easier to do, and generates electricity, offsetting the need for fossil fuels. "We believe that incinceration of household waste including disposable packaging and food waste, with energy recovery, is best for the environment, economy and managment of natural resources," wrote Valfrid Paulsson, former head of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. Well..., the idea of waste-to-energy is finally starting to catch on. Britain is now building 50 new waste-to-energy incinerators; Denmark's environmental protection agency recommended in a 2002 report that the country would be best to reroute parts of its recycling program to incinerators instead. With this, I encourage the leaders and policy makers from Canada, the US and Governments around the world to stop the Blue Box Blunder immediately and set a new course towards co-generation, waste-to-energy and the elimination of landfill as we know it today. Better yet, stop the financial disaster and abuse of capital, resources and the waste of human "energy" that is the blue box blunder.