Recycling Day: When Overpackaging and Waste Are Really Apparent

In my neighbourhood, as in most, we have recycling day every two weeks. A big truck drives around a huge area of the municipality (or multiple municipalities) and picks up recycling from each house at the curbside. Not everything is accepted for door to door recycling (examples of exclusions include plastic bags, Styrofoam, old electronics, batteries, and lightbulbs, etc.). Plastic and metal are put together in bins. Glass is supposed to be in separate bin. Paper goes in bags. Cardboard goes alongside the bins (someone told me a story about their cardboard being rejected by the recyclers once because they didn’t have it tied with twine, fortunately our recyclers don’t enforce this antiquated and wasteful rule).

This week, my husband out of town on business again, I hefted all of the recycling from our place out to the curb. Even carrying a huge amount per trip, it took me two trips to get everything to the curb. Part of the reason for this is the cardboard boxes from supplies we’ve ordered from Walmart and Amazon Prime these past two weeks. The pictures below are of just two weeks worth of recycling from our household (two adults, one who is travelling for work often and therefore not here to consume as much as usual, and a baby). I also didn’t bother taking the glass to the curb, as we only have a few glass containers, so I’ll wait until we have more.

I can't believe this is just from two weeks and a household of only two adults and one baby.

When I go out on walks and see our neighbourhood and others nearby on recycling day, I can’t help but be struck by all of the packaging our society uses (plastic boxes for spinach, endless yoghurt and milk containers, cans, cartons, and so much cardboard). Sure, some things need packaging, but there is a lot of overpackaging happening. If we decreased the amount of waste and moved to more of a zero waste position, think of how much less would have to be picked up on recycling day and processed (which takes a lot of energy and resources too). If we didn’t produce so many packages, we wouldn’t need to recycle so many packages. We would use less resources and there would be more left over for the future generations. So, while it's wonderful that we're diverting so much waste by recycling in Canada, it would be better if less waste existed in the first place.