UNHEALTHY EARTH
Unhealthy Earth
Introduction 2 Street Litter
4
Fish Killers
5
Boat Picker
6
Forest Pollution
7
City Pollution
8
Building vs. Landscape
10
Beach Litter
12
Animals’ Hunger
13
Traffic Jam
14
Sea Animals
15
Dump Citizen United
16
4
When presented with a clear option to not litter, Darren Sustar thinks people will take it. He believes so strongly that if given the choice people will choose to use a garbage can rather than throwing litter on the street that
Sustar has
launched an initiative called the
Parkdale Pail.
5
He believes so strongly that if given the choice people will choose to use a garbage can rather than throwing litter on the street that Sustar has launched an initiative called the Parkdale Pail. It’s a grassroots garbage management project that matches a pail with a resident with an aim of minimizing trash in Sustar’s north Parkdale neighbourhood. Sustar has lived with his family in a home on O’Hara Avenue for the past four years. Shortly after the strike by the city’s inside and outside workers, including garbage collectors, in 2009, Sustar started to take notice of the amount of waste and litter piling up at the corner of Queen Street West and O’Hara Avenue. Further to that, Sustar said in the gardens and sidewalks along O’Hara, between Queen West and Seaforth Avenue, there seemed to be a lot of litter.
6
“The kids are going from Queen Street that has a dollar store and all that retail and they
are walking up to the Parkdale Public school,” Sustar said. “On the way they are sort of dropping their garbage because there is nowhere to put it.”
Why couldn’t the homeowners on O’Hara, or on any street for that matter, take responsibility for the garbage, he asked?
Sustar said he doesn’t think the youth are throwing their garbage mischievously. Sustar said he has seen people stop and place garbage on the ground or in a bush.
Ergo the Parkdale Pail project, a grassroots initiative to divert trash off the sidewalks, gardens and lawns in the neighbourhood.
“They weren’t outright littering,” he said. “They just didn’t have anywhere to put their garbage and they didn’t want to carry it with them.” He contacted Councillor Gord Perks to inquire about having garbage cans placed along the street. Sustar heard back that there are rules and reasons for not putting full-sized garbage bins on side streets like O’Hara.
Sustar had a number of pails piled up from a construction project so he took one, drilled a few holes in it, designed a simple label with the image of someone throwing trash into a can and used a bicycle lock to affix it to the fence outside his home in September. Right away, the pail proved Sustar’s theory correct, he said.
Sustar said he understood the reasoning, but it sparked an idea where residents would take ownership of the problem instead of relying on government to solve it.
When presented with a clear option to not litter, Darren Sustar thinks people will take it.
7
“When it gets in the water, it continues to effect animals and people alike.�
8
People choose to put their garbage in the pail instead of on the ground. The pail has been there ever since. Sustar said he empties it once every other day and it generates two bags of garbage a week.
Jennifer Tomlinson, 7, a Grade 2 representative in the group, said it makes her angry when she sees other children littering. “I feel like just going up to their parents and telling,” she said. “If I’m at school and I don’t want to go find a garbage can, I’ll just put the garbage in my pocket. I don’t throw it on the ground.”
After some time, a few of his neighbours emailed him to ask if they could have a pail for their property and it is then when Sustar said he started Earth Patrollers sort through waste paper at to see the potential to spread the Parkdale Pail the school so it can be recycled. They also tour project through the neighbourhood and beyond. stores that sell recyclable products. The school’s cafeteria gives awards to students who repeatedly He set up a website and a Facebook page, and bring lunches in washable containers. sent out an email to his neighbours. He has started to compile a list of neighbours who want Tomlinson’s parents, Susan and Stephen, and her a Parkdale Pail for their property. Sustar said sister Melinda, 4, helped out in Sunday’s commuhe is figuring out the logistics of the project nity cleanup. The family found so much garbage and the best way to grow it, but said he would in one lot on Strasburg Road that they had to put eventually like to see it spread Parkdale-wide. it on the sidewalk for a garbage truck to pick up. “In the end I am also doing it as a bit of a social experiment to see how people want to participate,” he said. Members of the environmental group at Alpine Public School spent two hours picking up litter in an area bounded by Ottawa Street South, Homer Watson Boulevard, Bleams Road and Westmount Road. Among other things they found carpets and clothing, paint cans and paper, bottles and boards, even an old toilet.
“It disgusts me more than anything,” said Susan, a member of the Alpine Parents Committee which helped organize the cleanup. “I think it’s laziness. People will not take things where they belong.” About 200 volunteers took part in the cleanup. Six other area schools participated. Waterloo Region donated a composter to be given away and local businesses donated gift certificates. 9
Twenty gas-fired mini-incinerators ordered during the Welch administration seemed to offer an ideal method of disposing of much of the city’s garbage, 10
but they caused pollution problems, became too
expensive to operate and
eventually were discarded.
11
The Earth Patrollers went to work Sunday in Kitchener.
On Saturday, meanwhile, a group of area residents cleaned up the Kaufman Flats area beside the Grand River in Waterloo. About 15 adults and four children participated. Karen Earle, who organized the event, said two busloads of students from Rockway Mennonite Collegiate had picked up the heavy garbage before the weekend, but her group still found barbed wire, lawnchair frames, bed springs, waste drywall, a lamp and lots of paper and cans. 12
The Earle family composts, uses a wood stove for heating and tries to avoid buying heavily packaged items such as drink boxes, she said. Jason Earle, 9, said picking up garbage was important. People litter “cause they’re brainless,” he said. His sister, Kelly, 7, said she was surprised at how much people litter.
Cambridge Environmentalists can vouch for that. About a dozen members of the group showed up at Riverside Park in the Preston area on the weekend to lay a straw carpet on an eroding slope on which they planted trees on last year. Tobogganers and dirt- bikers destroyed many of the saplings, although the area is fenced and signs tell of the rehabilitation efforts, said Michael Parkinson, a member of the non profit, volunteer group.
He said the group is making a video about the rehabilitation project in an effort to get community support. Parkinson said a few Cambridge Environmentalists tried to explain the project to some tobogganners during the winner, but they said there was no use tree planting when the area would be developed. “They were very cynical, one even pulled a seedling out of the ground,” he said. “It’s an
13
“They just don’t care,” she said.
attitude I see in young people, maybe because we live in a world full of hypocrites.” 1992 The Record - Kitchener-Waterloo. All rights reserved. Garbage disposal crises litter Houston’s history. Every city administration in the past half century has wrestled with garbage problems, and when the garbage disposal system hits rough spots, everyone in the city can feel the bumps. These headaches have sparked endless debate and innumerable schemes for improvements. Some influential Houston business leaders now are calling for Mayor Kathy Whitmire to support “privatization’’ of city garbage collection operations, arguing that private enterprise can do a better job than the city. But back in March 1943, midway through World War II - long before the term “privatization’’ had been coined or garbage dumps had become landfills or the garbage department had become the Department of Solid Waste Management - the city was moving in the opposite direction. 14
Acting on recommendations of an expert on garbage disposal, City Council voted for the city to end 15 years of private garbage service and start collecting its own refuse again. The expert, Carl Schneider, a sanitary engineer from New Orleans, advised council, ``You may be certain that your garbage costs are going to be higher than they have ever been before, partly because you will be faced with rising wages, partly because you will be aiming at a higher type of service.’’ Unquestionably, that aim for better service often has not been nearly as true as city officials and citizens hoped. Oscar Holcombe was mayor in May 1950 when a Chronicle story asserted: ``There just couldn’t have been any flies anywhere else in South Texas Monday because they were all out at the Holmes Rd. garbage dump where the city garbage department claims all fresh garbage is burned and buried every day.’’ The actual situation, the story said, was that city workers were way behind in burying garbage, which seemed to have been deposited randomly around the dump rather than in an orderly fashion.
Allegations of a scrap metal “racket’’ at the dump made headlines in January 1951. On city time, it was charged, garbage workers were gleaning from the refuse they collected pieces of metal, rags and even old bones, then selling their finds to scrap dealers. A garbage department official said it was no big deal. The workers had permission to drop off scrap to dealers as their trucks returned to the barns after garbage runs were finished. But freshman Councilman Louie Welch insisted, “This brazen misuse of city equipment must stop.’’ A Council committee recommended that the city collect and sell scrap metal to the highest bidder, but no such plan materialized. Roy Hofheinz was mayor in October 1953 when controversy developed because areas of the city south of Buffalo Bayou and west of Wayside and Old Spanish Trail were getting three garbage pickups a week while other areas of the city were getting only two. A city ordinance in effect then required citizens to put out their garbage in heavy metal cans with secure lids. Some people who got only two pickups complained they had to pack their cans more fully and garbage men had to bang them more to empty them. In time, the service was equalized, but it’s uncertain the banging of garbage cans was significantly reduced. For a garbage service, no needs are more basic than maintaining places to deposit garbage and finding new disposal sites, but doing this has remained an almost constant challenge. Complaints about rats, roaches, flies, foul odors and garbage truck traffic have prompted citizens to agitate for closure of garbage dumps near their homes. And no matter what location has been proposed for new dumps, residents living in those areas have strenuously objected. 15
On occasion, police have jailed protesters who obstructed garbage dump operations, but eventually the protesters have almost always prevailed. For example, protests led to the closing of the city’s old Holmes Road and Reed Road dumps and a new dump in the Almeda-Genoa area. In 1970, the city began sending all its garbage to privately owned landfills. Technological problems have caused many of the city’s garbage disposal headaches. There have been garbage trucks that didn’t run properly because of design flaws or inadequate maintenance, old incinerators that created a fire hazard by emitting embers, new incinerators that never consistently met pollution standards. 16
Louie Welch was mayor in 1967 when the heralded Holmes Road incinerator was completed. Built at a cost of $4.3 million, it was touted as having the most sophisticated air pollution control system in the world. Nevertheless, the huge incinerator, which had been expected to burn half the city’s garbage, never functioned properly. For one thing, an unanticipated increase in the amount of plastic in domestic garbage produced gases that fouled the incinerator’s mechanism. Health officials found steam and waste water from the incinerator contained dangerous amounts of toxic metals.
Often, it has seemed that if
something could go wrong with the garbage system, large or small, it did.
17
One of the first actions of Mayor Fred Hofheinz’s administration in 1974 was to close the Holmes Road Incinerator. From the standpoint of finance and pollution control, it was a wise move, but it failed to take human factors into account. After City Council, at Hofheinz’s request, abolished 83 jobs at the defunct incinerator, it came to light that many of the workers affected were former garbage men who had been crippled in the line of duty and promised lifetime jobs. Red-faced city officials moved quickly to find other jobs for them. Last week’s three-day work stoppage by disgruntled garbage workers appears to have been the city’s longest such strike ever, but
18
it was by no means the first time garbage workers have dramatized their grievances or apprehensions in this fashion. Mayors Lewis Cutrer, Hofheinz and Jim McConn also had to deal with such illegal strikes. But Whitmire will go down in history as the first mayor, at least since 1943, to fire garbage workers for taking this action.
Portecting the World’s Oceans
1350 Connecticut Ave, NW, 5th floor Washington, DC 20036 USA Tel: (202) 833-3900 oceana.org