We are more than a little better...

Half a dozen times a year someone drives along our street and dumps out the debris from their just-finished McDonald’s ‘meal’.  It must be the same combination of food items because the litter lands in almost exactly the same place each time.  We do our self righteous little tut-tut and pick up the pieces and I assure myself that the offender will eventually either grow up or move away.

Rewind the video by 40 or 50 years and I would have been happily tossing my junk out of the car window too. Everyone did and I find it amazing that we did. I think I started to tut-tut in the mid seventies when I was commuting back and forth from PEI to Orono, Maine for graduate studies and the shoulders of what used to be called The Airline Route (high, narrow, twisty rte. 9) was glittery with broken bottles. In 1973 the PEI Women’s Institute http://www.womensinstitute.pe.ca initiated a province wide roadside cleanup and that might have been when I began to pay attention to junk; of course I would like to think I was more forward thinking but I’m quite sure I wasn’t. The roadside cleanup is exactly that. Garbage bags are readily available and groups, families, schools, individuals get out in the ditches and pick up junk. They leave the garbage bags on the roadside and it all gets picked up.  No wonder PEI has a reputation for looking tidy and clean. There are at least two reasons that PEI is an innovator in environmental issues: lack of resources and small size. Charlottetown has a smokeless incinerator for garbage from the whole province (no landfills in PEI!!!) and that incinerator heats the hospital and a bunch of other buildings in the east end of the city. The university http://home.upei.ca/  has a wood chip burner that supplies heat to a good bit of the western end of the city. Back in about 1965 the ARK project used a wind turbine for power, and so on and so on.

But I digress. What I actually want to comment on is that in the process of our renovation and move I’ve become aware of the amazing and fabulous opportunities there are in Victoria for getting rid of stuff. There are 26 official recycling options listed in the CRD (Capital Regional District) and there lots of unofficial options. Post garage sales we’ve taken leftovers to the Salvation Army or Value Village; St Vincent De Paul picks up bigger stuff; I’ve made friends on Used Victoria and Craig’s’ List where if you list things free they fly out the door, there is a landscape company that takes dirt, broken concrete, sod; every day of the week we can dump yard waste to be recycled to compost; there’s a “Free Store” where we’ve dropped off a tub, old tools, light fixtures, and someone picks things over and uses them; Habitat for Humanity has their Restore to which we have donated and from which we have purchased. It’s seemingly endless. But my hands down favourite is Ellice Recycle http://www.ellicerecycle.com/. With the aid of the Tweedie truck we made a lot of trips to Ellice’s ‘diversion centre’ where they pride themselves on diverting as much as possible from the landfill. It isn't free and we spent about $500.00 in dumping fees, but what a pleasure to have almost one-stop shopping for your real debris: like cardboard which we can put out with our curbside recycling pickup but we had mountains of it and it was in the way. And what’s really nice about Ellice is that it’s clean, and the staff is happy and helpful, and the buildings have the most beautiful murals on the exterior walls.

Yes, we are more than a little better than we used to be.