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Based in Toronto, Ontario - Canada - GreenR3.com focuses on tips and techniques that will help you lessen your carbon footprint and enhance your quality of life.


Fast Food, taxes and recycling…

One thing that I always notice about the Springtime is the HUGE amount of garbage that has built up and isn’t visiable under all the snow.

In our urban neighbourhood, it’s piled up in a and strewn about everywhere.    It’s mainly discarded fast food coffee cups (Tim Hortons around here), water bottles and small plastic bags filled with trash that people have either thrown out of their car window or perhaps it’s blown out of their trash cans on garbage day.

Either way… it’s a mess and I’m sure that 60-80% is recyclable.  There are teams of people that go out and pick up this trash in the Spring but it’s mainly just thrown in the landfill and not recycled.   I was wondering if there was a way to tax or put a ‘recycle value’ on the most common offenders.  Much like beer bottles, if we could put a deposit on coffee cups and water bottles, there would be a whole underground economy of people picking them up and recycling them.

Forgive my tangent here.. but if there was a dispensor beside the standard coffee shop where you could put the used coffee cups and get a coupon back in exchange.. then collect 50 coupons for a free coffee or donut etc. etc.  It may work.

Afterall, a bag of 100 coffee cups is a HUGE bag of waste.. whereas if the coffee cups are stacked just as they are when delivered, it would take up a lot less space in the landfill.

I’ll have to finish this tangent when I have the time…   Enjoy the spring.   Try not to focus on the garbage outside tooo much.


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