There are alternatives, and although they may cost just a little bit more, they don’t require replacement as often. Choose metal, glass, bamboo, or other more sustainable items that will last. Look to local shops and stores for these items, you’ll be surprised at the variety to choose from.

Plastics Thursday: October 21

Plastics are found everywhere in our daily lives. Unfortunately, they’re found in places we don’t want them to be as well. About 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the oceans each year – one garbage truck’s worth every minute.  “Only nine per cent of the 3.2 million tonnes of plastic waste Canadians produce each year is recycled… This is a lost opportunity of $7.8 billion CAD for Canada in 2016.”^[ii] Plastic being as versatile as it is, can be used for a lot of different things, even when recycled, shampoo bottles can become plastic lumber for decks!

Even still, there’s different types of plastics, and some of it is contaminated with other materials, making it unrecyclable or too expensive to recycle.

Plastic can also only be recycled a number of times before they need to be dumped as well, while glass and metal can be recycled over and over again.[iii]

Some general habits to adopt when reducing plastic waste include:

• Buy products with less plastic packaging
• Buying sustainable, reusable, or biodegradable alternatives
• Reusing the plastic products, you currently have as much as possible, if safe to do so

Food Waste Friday: October 22

When organic waste gets tossed in the garbage it produces methane gas – a GHG twenty-five times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere. Emissions from Canadian landfills account for 20% of national methane emissions and are a big contributor to climate change. Food waste also costs Canadians over $17 billion a year. Need a visual? Check out this video from Waste Reduction Week in Canada. A scary stat for the month of October…almost 40% of the food produced in Canada is wasted. Eeek. It’s time to do better.

Take action to reduce your food waste by:

• Planning meals and making a grocery list
• Storing fruits and vegetables properly so they last longer
• Getting creative with leftovers
• Compost leftover organics
• Adopting a healthier, more sustainable diet
• Organizing your cupboard or fridge to make sure the older food is upfront

Buying local can also help reduce food waste, as there’s less food loss along the way. Food loss is the food that ends up being unusable during transportation. With more miles to go, the more potential there is for food to be lost along the way – it can fall off a truck, be bruised in moving, etc.

SSEA’s Local Climate Change Action Plan includes an action to “Undertake a municipal waste audit in each respective municipal facility to identify opportunities for reduced GHGs contributions through improved recycling and green bin/organics participation at these facilities and during municipally-led events and festivals“. Even though events have been limited recently to COVID-19, we will again start enjoying indoor and outdoor events where we gather and celebrate. When we do so, there is usually food made available. It’s important to make sure each type of waste, including food and organics, is disposed of in the proper stream. This is an action item that we have been working on with our partners, and hope to make even more progress in 2022.

Saturday Sharing Economy: October 23

The sharing economy means switching from ownership to access. Renting cars or using rideshare apps, streaming movies and music, and renting suits are all examples of the sharing economy. Libraries especially come in all shapes and sizes, often public libraries offer more than books to check out, offering TV shows and movies, 3D printing sessions, and some places even becoming tool libraries where one might go check out a tool for a single task.

Sunday Swap and Repair: October, 24

The final piece to Waste Reduction Week is connected to the sharing economy – swap and repair. Figuring out how to extend the life of the things we buy and own is essential to waste reduction and the circular economy.  Repair Cafés are becoming more popular, where you can meet other people and learn about how to repair things you might have around the house. It’ll help save both money and the environment. Habitat for Humanity is another well-known organization for reusing products that don’t need to be thrown out.

There’s plenty of repair resources out there, here’s some things you might not have known you can repair in under 10 minutes! 

• Jeans
• Broken eyeglasses
• Headphones
• Flip flops
• Running toilets

You can also choose to swap items through things like Swapsity[ix] or Freecycle[x].

Some of these things may be cheap and easy to buy again, but think about where that product will end up. Buried, burned or recycled a few times?  Repairing makes it last longer and reduces our waste, helping the environment and the fight against climate change.

Taking Action

SSEA works in partnership with our local municipalities to respond to climate change. Midland, Penetanguishene, Georgian Bay, Severn, Tiny, and Tay know that we need to reduce our waste, and this is reflected in their Municipal Climate Action Plans. By approving these plans, these municipalities are working to figure out how to reduce their waste now and in the future. By learning about new approaches, developing pilot projects, and evaluating and celebrating our successes, SSEA and our local government partners are taking steps to reduce their GHGs and deliver on their climate change commitments.

For more waste and recycling facts, check out Straight Talk on Recycling, hosted by the Midland Cultural Centre!

Also, visit the Waste Reduction Week in Canada website for fascinating facts and videos all about waste and what we can do to reduce it. Share your comments with us on how you reduced your waste this week!

Article submitted by: Nikolas Kuchmij, Climate Action Program Coordinator, SSEA, October 2021

The post Reducing Waste = Reducing Your Climate Impact appeared first on Sustainable Severn Sound.

Ready to reduce your waste? From Monday, October 18 to Sunday, October 24, each day has a ‘theme’ selected by #WasteReductionWeek.   Read on for how you can take steps this week and any day of the year to reduce your waste. Let’s get started with Monday’s Circular Economy Kick-off, Textile Tuesday, and E-Waste Wednesday!

Each day from October 18-24, take a few moments to really think about the waste you create, and how you can take steps to reduce it. From what you buy, to what you give, and to how you dispose of an item, each of these decisions can have an impact on climate change and the GHGs that you produce. Now back to that 10% from our Local Climate Change Action Plan (LCCAP). It may not seem like a lot, but GHGs from community-produced waste come in third amongst the top five emitting sectors (1. transportation (54%), residential energy use (24%), waste (10%), commercial energy use (7%), and 5. industrial energy use (5%) approximate values for rounding).  This 10% equals about 57,991 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculator lets us see that if this was gasoline, it would equal the use of 26,911,590 litres of gas!

It’s important to remember that recycling itself uses energy. From transporting it to processing – and to the overall running of the facility. Sorting actual recyclables from garbage makes it even harder, and many items don’t make it through this process and end up in the solid waste stream instead of being recycled. That’s why it’s key to reduce our waste, not just recycle.

Monday’s Circular Economy and Kick-off: October 18th

We’re used to a linear economy. Extract, process and transport, use, and then dispose. A start-to-finish of things we use. A circular economy is when we design products and processes to reuse and reinvest into new products over and over again. With recycling, a company may make a product for people to use, but what happens to it after it’s done isn’t fully considered. With a circular economy, making a product means considering how it can be repaired, reused, shared, last longer, or be returned to the company. We’ve done this a few times with different businesses. Returning empty bottles, for example, gets you a deposit back, and the bottles can be reused. If they can’t be reused, then they’re recycled. There are different ways to improve the circular economy and you can find out more at https://circularinnovation.ca/.

Textile Tuesday: October, 19^th

Clothes, blankets, hats… all kinds of fabric or cloth are textiles. We all have seasonal cleaning to do (or think about doing) when the seasons roll around. But when we go through our closet, we realize how much we actually don’t use. Even then, Canadians on average buy 70 new articles of clothing per year, according to CBC. “Of the total fiber input used for clothing, 87% is landfilled or incinerated, representing a lost opportunity of more than USD 100 billion annually, we see it about one garbage truck of textiles landfilled or incinerated every second… It takes about 2,600 litres of water to make one new t-shirt.”

Even donating clothes has its drawbacks. Putting your clothes in a donation bin sends them off to be re-sorted and resold at commercial re-use stores. But only about 50% of those donated clothes are of good enough quality to be on the rack, and only half of those end up being sold. So a quarter of what might be donated only gets reused by the local community. The rest might get sent overseas to be reused in other countries, or be reprocessed into other clothes or used as rags. But all that ends up producing more GHGs than would have been used if it stayed local, or didn’t need to be moved at all. Not only that, but it turns out that this is hurting the textile industry in countries where the clothes are sent. Some countries in East Africa even united to try and ban imported textiles. It’s still better to donate than toss them in the garbage outright, and there’s always the potential for them to be reused, as them ending up in a landfill not only increases GHGs but takes up valuable landfill space which can increase the need for new landfills and drive up municipal tax rates. There’s plenty of ways to avoid textile waste. We can:

• Design and buy better quality clothes that last longer
• Wash only when we need to – microplastics in clothing won’t get washed away into the water system as much
• Increase the average number of times clothes are worn
• Swap and share
• Make dog toys out of old strips of shirts and other Do-It-Yourself projects (cleaning cloths, braided rugs, etc.)
• Recycle more – we can show that we want more things recycled, thereby making it worthwhile for businesses to invest in things like clothing recycling
• Read about Textile Tuesday! This event raises awareness of the environmental consequences of clothing and textiles consumption, providing information on how you can extend the life of your clothing.

E-Waste Wednesday: October 20th

In 2017, Canada threw out 638,300 metric tonnes of electronic waste or e-waste. The Global E-waste Monitor 2020 report stated that the world created 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste in 2019. This is the weight of 350 cruise ships or enough to form a line 125 kilometers long. E-waste comes in the form of smart devices and phones, batteries, and fluorescent lights. They’re all made up of different materials to make the technology we use today. Being able to reuse or recycle the materials can go a long way, especially since many of them are non-renewable, meaning they can’t be naturally reproduced fast enough to be replaced. We can embrace a circular economy by having the companies that design electronics make them easy to repair, reuse/refurbish, recycle, return, or generally last longer. The longer we use them or share them, the less e-waste we produce. It’s just as essential to recycle our e-waste when possible, as it can be 13 times cheaper to salvage these recyclables than to mine them fresh from the Earth. You can drop off your e-waste at any Simcoe County waste management facility, free of charge. Visit the County of Simcoe website to find a drop-off location near you.

Visit us again on Thursday this week for our perspective on the remaining Waste Reduction Themes including Plastics Thursday, Food Waste Friday, Sharing Economy Saturday, and Swap and Repair Sunday.

Article submitted by: Nikolas Kuchmij, Climate Action Program Coordinator, SSEA, October 2021

The post It’s Waste Reduction Week in Canada! appeared first on Sustainable Severn Sound.