Garbage limits and the right to destroy ourselves

i've had one hell of a day being an environmentalist. i work at a coffee shop making minimum wage, and am exhausted by the amount of garbage created every day by corporations much like where i work. The amount of paper or styrofoam cups, the amount of milk cartons, plastic cups, straws, sugar packets, and garbage bags is shameful. We waste so much water, too, rinsing things only to put the same ingredients back into it a moment later. All that clean, free water, all those thirsty third world babies. This, more than anything else, is why i hate my job. onto the news...

City looks at price tag for trash
New plan allows four bags free
Recycling would remain unlimited
JOHN SPEARSCITY HALL BUREAU
Garbage hogs, get ready. The city is mulling a proposal to charge householders who put out more than four bags per collection.
But it won't happen until 2007, if a staff report is accepted first by the city's works committee and then by Toronto City Council.
The plan is designed to reduce the city's garbage, not to generate extra income, according to the report.
It's a reworking of a hotly debated proposal submitted last December, and rejected by the works committee, that recommended a fee of $1.50 for every bag beyond the first two bags on each pickup.
One councillor denounced the earlier plan as a "head tax" on large families.
The new proposal would give every household four free bags. Any others would need to have city stickers attached.
The stickers would be free in 2006, to get people used to the idea. Starting in 2007, the tag for each bag over the four-bag limit would cost $1.
Households would be given half a dozen free stickers each year, so they wouldn't have to pay if they cleaned out their garage and had a lot of extra bags one week.
While not viewed primarily as a source of revenue, the bag tags should still turn a profit of $1.5 million a year by 2008 for the city, according to the report.
Unlimited collection, at no charge, will still be available for recycling, green bins and yard waste.
The staff report says 140 Ontario municipalities already have bag tag systems in place.
A proposed fee on apartment and condominium waste pickup will complement the charge for household bags.
The fee, termed a "waste reduction levy," has also been reworked since it was first floated.
The current version would start by weighing the weekly garbage generated by each building and then setting reduction targets.
Buildings that achieved their targets would not pay a fee; those that failed would pay a levy starting at $30 a tonne on the excess, escalating as excess garbage increased.
The system would require the city to buy sophisticated equipment that would accurately measure and record each building's garbage output.
The garbage fee proposals will be discussed at the works committee's meeting next Wednesday.

This recent move to charge per bag has its ups and downs. The upside is that it shows a significant movement towards reducing waste, but the problem and the downside is that people are wildly creative when it comes to being penalized for being wasteful. I can imagine people dumping things in parks the evening they get home and see their extra bag has not been removed. I'm sure people would be willing to even spend more than a dollar on gas to illegally dump their excess trash in other places. The thing that this proposal neglects is the first world social construction of the right to consume. Note the councillor who argued that such a proposal would be a head tax on large families. While he does make the case that larger families will produce more waste, he also forgets that larger families may not waste as much, if the living situation is tighter. In forgetting this point, he seems to be demonstrating something not necessarily about reality, but about the socially constructed right to consume. in reality larger families might throw out less because of economic necessity, but he is defending the normative principle of having the right to be in a large, wasteful family.

Back to my issues with the coffee shop. The underlying problem is that there is no monetary representation of what garbage means to society. Nor is there a signficiant monetary representation of what such wasteful consumption patterns mean to society. The reason why everyone would get up in arms about paying for additional garbage collection likely stems from free garbage collection, and the limitless ability to throw away as much as one pleases.

I can say what garbage means. It represents our willingness to choose short-term well-being over long-term well-being. Places like the one i work at could not stand to make profit if they actually had to pay or incorporate into the price of their services the actual cost of their services on the environment. It is the collective willingness to screw everybody over. It is a collective action problem. By removing yourself as much as you can from this game, people still stand to ruin it for you by driving so much or leaving their engines running.

The last point I'd like to make for now is the utter absurdity of trying to colonize other planets. I've read big long hypothetical projections of how to colonize mars and make an atmosphere and develop water. While i commend scientific discovery, i just cant believe it is actually being considered. It shows that some minds have actually decided against saving a planet far more hospitable to humans, and are in favour of starting anew. What do we do, when people may be willing to invest billions of dollars into such projects, but cannot commit to any real significant environmental movement here on earth? Anyone who has ever considered themselves an environmentalist must just wince at the utter absurdity of this global psyche. Maybe the mars project makes more sense because nobody else would be there to screw it up or take it away from them.


the following are a few tips off the top of my head that actually help if you want to change things. if anyone has any other big ideas, feel free to post em.

-say no to plastic bags. you dont need them for everything you buy. they live longer than you do.
- reuse stuff. all the time. im in the secret habit of charging as little as i can for the customers who bring in their own travel mugs.
-never use paper plates or plastic cutlery. while they seem cheap at the stores, their actual costs again are not known. but the plastic lives longer than any human being, and paper takes a lot of time to grow.
-if you have control over your house temperatures, turn everything off. its summer right now, fool. you wont die from the heat, but you might die from the smog.