Citizens taking action ~ Vancouver, Lower Mainland, and beyond.


Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Mumble BC webinar a snoozer -- except question period

Except for question period -- which turned out to be live -- the MMBC webinar was a total waste of time. Who wants to listen to a patronizing Ontario voice read PPT slides summarizing stacks of meaningless data?

But as soon as she sat down the members of the audience let her have it -- but politely (this is Canada).

Local government reps bit the hand that they hoped was going to feed them, finding fault with data that they said Mumble BC should have seen was glaringly inconsistent.

MRF operators raised an obvious practical question : is Mumble BC shooting for an aggregate target of 75% recycling -- or 75% of each different material. (This question, of course, belongs to the Ministry. It will be a central point of public concern: aggregate targets reward the laggards.)

MRF operators in BC like Cascades Recovery and Urban Impact and Emterra have been spending a fortune tooling up their plants with Rube Goldberg machines to sort ketchup bottles out of newspapers -- they don't want to spend a fortune if Mumble BC isn't going to give them part of the action. Cascades CEO Al Metauro jumped up three times and tried to pin MMBC down on how the pie was going to be divvied up.

Recycling advocates, we are about to lose EPR -- our Ministry is giving it away. Designating PackagingAndPrintedPaper as a single product category under the regulation is sending us down the road to single-stream recycling. And Mumble BC is quite open about intending to direct "non recyclable packaging" to incinerators.

Will we Occupy EPR -- or let the Retail Council take it away from us?

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