I NEVER used to think of garbage as a ‘“‘sexy’’ subject. But then I grew up in a world that was still a long way from sagging under the weight of its own garbage. By sexy, I mean intensely inter- esting. Today, 1 find myself reading everything 1 can about garbage, which, incidetitally, breaks down ‘into several categories, ranging from the extremely hazardous, like radiosctive byproducts, to the wonderfully reusable. A mother tells me, for instance, that she recycles those pesky lictie plastic milk bags by using them to wrap lunches. As a tmie recyciing industry starts up in Nozth America, fol- lowing the European lead, we will see more and more ‘“‘recycling mills’’ being constructed. Guess where they are going to be tacated? The head of a recycling company gave me the answer the other day. They will be located, just as lumber mills were before them, when trees were the main resource, néar the new resource base: in this case, cities. : _ ‘The one thing cities “‘grow’’ is garbage. Mountains of it. The same economic laws that drew the lumber barons to the forests will pull the recycling kingpins to the edge of suburbia. The raw tonnage involved is staggering. Nowadays, in B.C., every family of four generates some 7,000 pounds of waste per year, which amounts, in total, to over two mil- lion tonnes of solid waste. This figure is crecping steadily upward. . As yet, very little of that is recycled. And of course it is because the problem is not yet overwhelming. British Columbians certainly don’t have a waste disposal prob- lem on the scale of places like On- tario, where the City of Toronto is on the verge of running out of landfill sites by next June. Wait for the Toronto garbage joke; to surface next year, along with a plague of rats, once the dump trucks have to be parked, owing to a lack of any place for GVRD gives out posters. THE GREATER Vancouver Regional District will be tapping the deep wells of Beatles nostalgia when it distributes personal recyci- ing Posters throughout October to herald in what has been designated “Recycle Month’. The full-color posters, which add a recycling spin to the Beatles’ Abbey Rosd album cover, will be available at the GYRD offices, 4330 Kingsway, Vancouver, or at various mall displays during Oc- tober, including the Capilano Mall, Oct. 26 to 29. The annual recycling month is sponscred by the GVRD in association with other government agencies, the private sector and community organizations. them to unload the stuff they pick up. The garbage apocalypse is a peculiarly Central Canadian prob- lem, of course. Most of the Cana- dians outside the Golden Horse- shoe are not generating anything like the amount of junk being up- chucked daily by the country’s most concentrated mass of con- + summers. Tic garbage apocalypse is a pecuiiarly central * Canadian problem, of ’ course. Most.af the Canadians outside the Golden Horseshce are not generating anything like the amount of junk being. upchucked.daily by the | country’s most concentrated mass of consumers.’’ Yet, surely, waiting for the last second to save one’s bacon — and the bacon of future generations — especially wher one knows what's coming, is uninteltigent, unloving behavior; to say the least. Even B.C., believe it or not, is finite. Far more finite, in fact, than a map would suggest, since only a fraction of the province is truly habitable. The habitable part happens to be paradise, but that’s actually beside the point. The West Coast garbage tsunami | is coming in, slowly but inex- orably. According to the B.C. Ministry of the Environment’s solid waste management survey, some 60 per cent of the province’s 236 licensed landfills are scheduled to close within the next 10 years. _ Ten years go by in a flash, in case you hadn’t noticed. And the percentage of sites to be Before you buy your Mercedes-Benz discover the difference in prices and selection, over the Lion’s Gate Bridge in North Vancouver. closed within 25 years rises to 90 per cent. In other words, we will have to find nearly as many landfill sites as we already have — all over again! Keep in mind that our present landfill situation is the result of a century of serious industrializ- ation. Also, people never used to resist these things the way they do now, and will continue to do so, with ever-increasing levels of passion, in the future. The NIMBY (‘‘not in my back yard!’’) syndrome is here to stay and it runs dead against the grain of the need for more dumps. Maybe a better way of looking at the problem is to think of an oil spill, for which there are no ex- cuses. It is a man-made nightmare. A natural catastrophe can at least be attributed to God, and therefore imbued with mystical meaning — however awful the disaster. Not so a disaster caused by - small, greedy, fumbling, drunken human hands. And when we refer to ecological disasters, let’s not forget the day- to-day mini-disasters that occur all the time. { have just learned from an ex- pert on oil problems that seven times the amount of oil that was spilled from the Exxon Valdez is NORMALLY leaked into the en- -vironment, worldwide, every year. The difference between that and the obvious catastrophe that we could ail see — cil-caked puffins weakly rolling their heads — when a single gigantic spill occurred, is that this other, vastly larger disaster, is occurring all the time. It’s just that it is coming one tiny ‘‘spill’’ at a time: a leak here, a leak there, somebody throwing out an old can of motor oil, a skipper dumping a pail of oil- soaked rags into the sea when no one is around, a topped-up trailbike spewing gasoline, a 747 dumping fuel prior to an emergen- cy landing... It’s all ‘just garbage,’ ch? © . 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