Editor:
If anyone had any doubts about MMBC’s motives in relation to ultimately incinerating Metro garbage, let them examine how recycling clients of GRIPS in Pender are now reacting to the new list of acceptable and unacceptable plastic items that must not be recycled under threat of onerous fines to recyclers.
The list is so vague and complex that most clients of the GRIPS depot give up and send almost everything plastic except containers to the landfill. Even GRIPS workers cannot tell what is acceptable to MMBC. Sechelt and B.C. can expect the same reaction with curbside blue boxes.
Normally where GRIPS received 40 containers of such plastic film, we now receive three. The rest will be going to the landfill in Sechelt while in Metro Vancouver, it will go to the incinerator in Burnaby, which has been short of high BTU fuel.
Previously GRIPS sold all such recycled plastic for re-use. So what has changed?
The Ontario corporations that run MMBC want to recover their energy costs for their plastic packaging by turning garbage into fuel and electricity that we must buy from Hydro.
Without at least 15 per cent plastic, garbage is not an acceptable fuel for generating electricity.
MLA Nicholas Simons has rightly protested the decline of civic virtue in the B.C. legislature. At every level of government in Canada, this disease is evident to the point where citizens no longer believe that government is on their side. Voters and vets, scientists and teachers, parents and seniors in care, householders and recyclers: the list is long.
The ultimate goal of corporate lobbyists is to promote cynicism and distrust of democracy. The duty of citizens is to listen to their hearts and use their heads.
