The individual changes first and the world follows
KAMLOOPS — Twice a week I get to spend an hour sipping tea and reading while my little guy is in karate class. In a coffee shop, that is. Every time I order, I have to make sure I mention ‘for here’ and that I want a reusable cup. The coffee shop is half-full that time of day, and save for the very rare ‘porcelain cup person’, everyone else is enjoying their beverages out of disposable cups. Plus straws for the cold beverages. Oh, and those useless domes, also plastic. As I take the back alley back to pick up my son, there are beverage cups and straws scattered in the back alley.
It’s a head scratcher. Why wouldn’t we all take reusable cups, be it our own or the ones in the coffee shops? The amount of garbage and plastic especially is suffocating life as we know it. In the case of disposable coffee cups, the route is a short one: straight to garbage. Though some coffee shop paraphernalia bears some recycling signage, most facilities do not accept them as they have no appropriate technology to recycle them. So even with a certain conservative approach, what we use during a coffee shop excursion becomes, for the most part, garbage. As a society and planet too, that is not acceptable anymore. Better yet, it is not affordable.
Yet it is hard to know how to navigate the waters of reducing one’s garbage and recycling output. In our family, we maintain a constant challenge to reduce the two as much as we can, week after week. It’s not easy. Once you become aware of it, it is a revelation to keep track of the trail of waste your purchases leave behind. There are household objects that come so tightly and excessively packaged in non-recyclable plastic that it really makes you wonder if we have truly lost touch with reality. If one cares about their waste footprint, it is a painful thing to watch the garbage bin fill up with packaging material, or various items that make our lifestyle what it is.
As for the comfort that many conscious recyclers took in knowing that though excessive at times in everyday life, the recyclables are taken care of… well, that ended on January 1 of this year when China revised the purity standards for the recyclable materials they are purchasing from around the world.