WELCOME TO the 1990s. Fittingly, a place called Halton
Region, outside of Hamilton, Ontario, entered the new de-
cade by becoming the first municipality in Canada to hire
garbage police to enforce a mandatory recycling program.

**Recycling inspectors’? — that’s
much nicer than junk cops or
waste narks or dump dicks or any
of a dozen other names they could
be called — will begin patrolling
the streets of Halton Region in
January to make sure that
residents are putting their newspa-
pers, cans and bottles in the proper
Blue Box containers, to be picked
up at curbside.

People who fail to comply with
the recycling laws will get several
warnings before being busted.
Then they'll either be hit with fines
of up to $2,000 or — gasp! — their
garbage simply won’t be picked up
any more and they will be left to
stew in their own rubbish.

A ter exhuming
16,600 pounds of
garbage, Rathje
and his researchers
Sound that only
about one-10th of
one per cent of the
landfill’s contents
consisted of fast-
food packaging.”’

The recycling inspectors are ex-
pected to be hired from the ranks
of the Canadian Corps of Com-
missionaires. They will note which
houses fail io put out their Blue
Boxes — the ubiquitous plastic
containers which are the hallmark
of recycling programs throughout
Ontario.

Recycling police are the wave of
the future, all right. And it is
because we're running out of land-
fill sites, right?

Well, actually, no. At least, not
according to William J. Rathje, an
anthropologist from the University
of Arizona, who has been studying
North American garbage and
landfill sites since the early 1970s.

Rathje’s findings liave been tur-
ning conventional wisdom about
garbage on its head, just at a time
when the garbage issue has finally
reached the top of government
agendas around the world.

On the controversia! question of
landfill sites, for instance, he con-
tends that in North America —
particularly Canada, of al! coun-
tries — there is no shortage of
space at all. It is just that nobody
wants a site in their back yard, and
for reasons of delivery economy,
big cities want dump sites that are
handy.

“*The problem,”’ Rathje writes
in the lastest issue of The Atlantic
Monthly, ‘‘is that old landfills are
not being replaced. Texas, for cx-
ample, awarded some 250 permits
a year for landfills in the mid-
seventies, but fewer than 15 last

Organ and Tissue Donation

Talk about it with
your next of kin

year.””

The fact that 50 per cent of the
existing landfills will have to close
down within five years likewise
does not strike Rathje as peculiar
or even all that alarming, since
most landfills are only designed to
be in use for about 10 years at
most.

One of his most surprising
discoveries is that we are probably
not creating any more garbage per
capita than we were at the turn of
the century. Individuals in Mexico
City, he argues, produce a third
again as much garbage as North
Americans.

There is a widespread and stub-
bornly-held ecofreak belief that
modern North American city
dwellers are the greatest creators of
garbage in human history. But
Rathje’s findings dispute this. We
each produce, he estimates, slightly
less than three pounds per day of
waste.

At the turn of the century, we
were probably producing slightly
more, when you include the 1,200
pounds of coal ash every person
generated at home, or when you
include the bodies of all the hun-
dreds of thousands of dead horses
that had to be disposed of.

in an era of fast-food packaging
and planned obsolescence, it is
natural to assume that we waste on
a colossal scale, but Rathje con-
tends that the scale is only equal to
our greater-than-ever numbers, not
to the quantity of garbage we per-
sonally produce.

He offers the exvampie of orange
juice concentrate. Individuals may
feel holier-than-thou by squeezing
their own oranges, but the rinds
end up being thrown out, whereas
orange juice manufacturers sell the
stuff as feed.

After exhuming 16,000 pounds
of garbage, Rathje and his resear-
chers found that only about one-
10th of one per cent of the land-
fill’s contents consisted of fast-
food packaging.

Another surprise: less than one
per cent consisted of disposable
diapers.

“The real culprit in every land-
fill is plain old paper — non-fast
food paper, and mostly paper that
isn’t for packaging,” he writes.
‘*Paper accounts for 40 to 50 per
cent of everything we throw away,
both by weight and by volume.

Newspapers are, of course,
among the major offenders. They
make up between 10 and 20 per
cent of a typical municipal landfill
site.

“But in all the hand-wringing
about the garbage crisis,’’ asks
Rathje, ‘‘has a single voice been
raised against the proliferation of
telephone books?

“Dig a trench through a landfill
and you will see layers of phone
books, like geological strata, or
layers of cake.’’

The problem with paper is that it
doesn’t actually biodegrade very
well at a landfill site. Deep within
landfills, newspaper editorials
compiaining about fast-food con-
tainers will remain legible well into
the next century, !ong after most
of those containers have been
crushed into pulp. Ironic, but true.

eco

F

an

Mother Goose
flies to N. Van

THEATRE FANS have four more
days to catch the Deep Cove Stage
Society's annual pantomime at
Presentation House in North Van-
couver,

Already into its second week,
The Wonderful Word of Mother
Goose continues Jan. 3 to 6 at 8
p.m., with a special matinee at 2
p.m. on Jan. 6.

Producer Ann Booth says the
English pantomime, a fairy tale
told in song and dance and farce,
has long been a traditional
favorite.

‘*When Canadians think of pan-
tomime they tend to think of
mime, but it’s completely the op-
posite. [t's a lively performance
with songs, dance and comedy. It’s
pure corn,"’ said Booth.

The audience, she said, is en-
couraged to boo the bad guys and
cheer the good guys.

Each panto has a ‘‘Dame’’~~ a
man dressed as a man-hungry
woman. Ken Turner plays the
Dame in the Deep Cove Stage
production. The hero, usually a
prince, is played by a long-legged
‘woman wearing a short costume,
said Booth.

Tickets for the The Wonderful
World of Mother Goose are $8 for
adults, $6 for children and seniors,
obtainable at Presentation House
or Patches (929-4344). For more
information phone 986-1351.

"A

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INTERNATIONAL PLAZA COMPLEX

- 1989 Marine Drive
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Meet the Challenge
Be Computer-Wise in 1990

OFFICE TECHNOLOGY

Daytime Programs

There are still a few spaces left in our full time
Accelerated Program which begins January 8.
Financial and secretarial options are avialable.
Call 984-4959 for registration information.

Evening Courses

Word Perfect 5.0

Now is the time to learn word processing.
Tuesdays: 6 - 10 p.m., January 9 to April 17.
Prerequisite: keyboard skills

Advanced Word Processing

Advanced features of Word Perfect 5.0
including merging and integration of files.
Thursdays: 6 - 10 p.m., January 11 to March I.

Electronic Office Procedures - dBase SI Fius
Find out what a database program car do for
you. Wednesdays: 6 - 10 p.m., March 7 to
April 18. Prerequisite: keyboarding skills and
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Earn credits towards an Information
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for general interest, but call 984-4959 naw —
classes fill quickly.

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