August 28, 2007
Mr. Garbage Comes To Town
Apparently, Rod Muir, Waste Diversion Toronto founder, former Toronto mayoral candidate, and current Waste Diversion Campaigner for the Sierra Club of Canada, doesn't mind his nickname. "Mr. Garbage" loves, well, our trash, inspired by all of the lost energy and resources we throw out every day.
As ecologists (and increasingly some economists) point out, human beings are the only creatures on Earth that create true "waste." Everything that every other lifeform produces ends up getting absorbed back into the ecosystem as food for something else. It's therefore not inconceivable that we could design our products—and our waste diversion process—in such a way as to also produce zero waste.
The good news: technologies and techniques already exist to start making that shift. Tomorrow evening (August 29) at 6:45 p.m., Muir will give his presentation on waste diversion and ecological footprint reduction, including what it has to do with issues like the climate crisis. It's going down at City Hall in Committee Room 3, and is presented by Post Carbon Toronto.
Photo by dave.in.t.o. in the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
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Todays garbage is tomorrow's gold. I tell ya', you find any way to recycle or use what people throw out (people are doing it now, quite successly) and you are set. This will be the biggest issues facing our world (besides George Bush starting WW3) and the people who come up with ways to deal with it...as long as you can deal with smelly things. The amount we toss out is staggering, but I would definitely like to see companies take more repsonsiblity in their packaging...these plastic vacuum sealed packages that you need a blow-torch to open, and then a ka-jillion twist ties and pieces of foam. There's gotta be a better way.
"human beings are the only creatures on Earth that create true "waste."
NO SHIT, is there any need to say something so stupid? Painful...