To Hell With Blue Box Recycling in Niagara!

Just Take All Your Plastic Waste – ‘Black’ or Whatever It Is – and Throw It In the Garbage

Throw You Blue Box In The Garbage Too

A Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter and publisher Doug Draper

Posted August 10^th, 2022 on Niagara At Large

According to recent reports in Niagara, Ontario’s mainstream media newspapers, Niagara’s regional government doesn’t seem to know how to handle or what to do with plastics in our Blue Boxes.

There is something about “black plastics” – whatever to hell that is – and “plastic contamination” in the Blue Boxes that apparently does not meet the Ontario Ford government’s regulations. (As if the Ford government has any regulations on contamination or on protecting our environment that we should take seriously at all.)

This is becoming bloody ridiculous and I will admit I have to take a wee little of the blame for once promoting Blue Box recycling in Niagara.

Back in the 1980s, when a good guy named Brian McMullan (later to serve as a mayor for the City of St. Catharines) was manager of the young and fledgling Niagara Recycling company, I was the full-time environment reporter and I used my podium at that paper to report on and promote recycling as an alternative to throwing all of our residential and commercial waste in a landfill or what,back then, was more commonly called “a dump.”

Along came Jim Bradley, then a St. Catharines Liberal MPP who became Ontario’s Envronment Minister during the mid- to late-1980 and he worked to make Blue Box recycling a happening across the province.

Those were proud days.

But now, we appear to be having problems at the Regional government level with whatever “black plastics” are, and with plastic “contamination” and whatever else- making it harder and harder for we homeowners and others to decide what the hell we should even put in those boxes.

In know my suggestion may horrify some people and it bothers me as well. But since the planet appears to be going down the toilet anyway, thanks to climate change, why not simply throw all of our plastic in the regular garbage.

If Niagara is going to expand its urban boundaries into more of our green areas or gut more of our woodlands and wetlands, what difference will a little black plastic or plastic contamination make?

As for metal and aluminum containers, try putting them in a clear plastic bag on the collection day for your household waste and you may find that metal scrap dealers will be happy to pick it up.

As for glass, who knows if the Region can still figure out what to do with that. So into the garbage it goes.

I write all of this with tears in my eyes for our planet but with anger for the stupidity of our regional government and province when it comes to handling potentially recyclable waste.

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

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