Waste Management and Recycling
Although we have made great progress diverting regional waste from landfill and incineration, municipalities, including Waterloo Region, are still looking at expanding landfill sites and building waste incinerators to burn and bury waste. These would inevitably emit pollutants, including toxics and greenhouse gases.
New approaches are needed to break through producers’ resistance to taking responsibility for the waste caused by the products and services they sell you. We need enforceable government regulations that require manufacturers to take responsibility for the complete lifecycle of their products based on a circular economy model.
As the folksinger and social activist, Pete Seeger, wrote:
“If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted...then it should be restricted, redesigned, or removed from production.”
Issues:
- One third of residential waste still goes to landfill,
- No municipal composting programs in multi-residential buildings,
- More than half of our waste is from commercial, business and institutional sources,
- Consumer waste from a product is less than 10 percent of the waste created in the manufacturing process of that product.
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