On Recycling

 (I will find photos for this post another time- I'm pretty fed up and tired right now after writing it)

Today I did not want to buy jelly jars because I believe in recycling glass but I had to buy them because the Thompson Nicola Regional District (TNRD) will not allow people to take glass jars from their recycling bins anymore- just like the (now closed) John Hayle Transfer center. (Although they said it was because of potential lawsuits and then later that the items belonged to the parent company...this was shortly after a school closed down and all these projectors and printers were coming into the site...)

I was out at the TNRD waste facility (the DUMP) with my sister which has a great view of the valley and was told we were not allowed to take pictures of the new project underway- the TNRD is evidently creating a 'stop and shop' for items that come into the landfill that can be recycled- in other words, they will probably be re-selling re-usable items to keep them out of the landfill and we will have to pay for the costs of managing the concept by buying such things.

You can't really blame them because too many people obviously have more money than common sense and rather than donating usable items to thrift stores, charity-run yard sales or needy people they are perfectly willing to PAY the TNRD to take their unwanted things! The dump was getting so much of it that they put a recycling facility on the site.
They have the same type of plastic box frames that were at the J.H.T. center for glass (funny), a section for propane tanks, an area for tires, fridges and large appliances, computers and electronics, and miscellaneous scrap metals.

When we took out the old carpeting from the house a few years ago I saw in the actual dump enormous amounts of useable building material, fencing materials, furniture etc. It's shocking that our society is in such a state that we practically have to throw away such things because nothing has ever been put in place to re-purpose these items outside of the dump. A wood pellet manufacturing facility was built in Merritt but I never heard of them accepting wood waste for their operations- and God knows we all have loads of old fence planks sitting around in our back yards! We used to have 'bee-hive- burners that incinerated wood waste (and animal carcasses as well I'm told) but these were dismantled due to the air quality concerns.

(The air quality here is still disgusting here because the mills still produce and vent out incalculable quantities of sawdust, the many unpaved roads/lanes in Merritt, vacant and barren lots full of noxious weeds, relative absence of green spaces, and all of it baked hot and dry by the scorching heat and carried about by the incessant winds. And lets not forget the residential watering restrictions.)

I was never ashamed of second hand items. I had an old but extremely solid couch and chair re-upholstered rather than buy a new ones. I shop in second hand stores and yard sales because I find things made from many years ago that still work, are better designed and last longer than the crap I see in the box stores. Even the carpeting we pulled out was cut up so that the good pieces could be re-used: they were rolled up, tied together and left outside the house and were gone in two days...probably to line the bottoms of truck beds.

And I always re-used glass jars. It's just too bad that rather than spend my money in support of local merchants and their associated charities I will eventually have to assist in subsidizing the costs of managing second hand goods.