Green Bins in London? HAH!
Staff went to ETC earlier this evening with a recommendation that a 750-household Green Bin pilot program be approved, noting that it’s already been included in the 2010 draft budget.
Instead of adopting that very modest, long-overdue pilot, ETC voted to defer the program for another year.
That ETC motion will now proceed to next Monday’s Council meeting, where I’m hopeful that it will defeated and the staff recommendation adopted instead.
Stay tuned. I’ve got much too much video to do anything with quickly, but I am going to try to extract the audio from what I recorded and make that available as quickly as possible.
Appended 2010/01/12 @ 03:00 p.m:
The video’s not ready yet but the 80-minute audio is now online and you can
listen HERE.
© Fowler Media
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Should of had the green bins before the blue boxes. i guess that would have too much sense.
I’ve been doing some research and here’s a quick update on where things are:
http://www.adamsson.ca/londons-green-bin-pilot-program-update
Shawn
Truth be told, in an ideal world I’d oppose the green bin program. And I’ll oppose any full rollout of green bins in London. A full program would be a huge expense that most people ought to be doing themselves.
I support going forward with the pilot program because Jay Stanford said at ETC that it’s the only way to get some useful information. And I’m hoping that such information will help to provide costs, etc. of any future program that would help to convince staff to NOT go forward with a full rollout.
If you’ve listened to the audio of the ETC meeting that I provided, then you’re aware of the very real concerns about meeting the province’s diversion target and the need to do so. Going ahead with the green bin pilot program may demonstrate to the province that we’re at least trying and may buy us some cred with them. But it’s only a stop-gap tactic, at best.
What we really ought to be doing, and should have been doing long before now, is to significantly expand our blue box program. Even if that means stockpiling some things locally that currently there’s no market for. And maybe taking steps to try and encourage the business community to create those markets.
We should also be pressuring the province and the business community as hard as we can with respect to the Producer Responsibility issue. The businesses that create and package the products that end up in landfills should be paying for their disposal.
I’m also very much in favour of a user-pay garbage collection system, which includes fees that are substantial enough to give everybody very serious pause before they send anything to a landfill.