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We’ve figured out how to turn trash into treasure. Not the wooden chest of gold coins-type treasure, but treasure for our modern world: clean energy. The evidence: my city, the city of Toronto, has a new garbage truck with an engine (a Cummins Westport ISL G) that’s capable of running on compressed natural gas, including biogas. And where are they planning to get that source of biogas? From composting operations that handle the green bin waste (kitchen waste) removed from Toronto curbsides by… Toronto garbage trucks.

“Our two green bin processing facilities have the potential to produce enough natural gas to take our entire fleet of 300 waste trucks off diesel,” says Geoff Rathbone, the City of Toronto’s General Manager of Solid Waste Management Services. “Creating natural gas from kitchen waste will be the first operation of its kind in North America.”

Replacing diesel trucks with lower-emission biogas trucks is all a pilot project at this point, but the city is motivated: its Green Fleet Plan calls for new medium and heavy-duty trucks in order to reduce fuel consumption, fuel costs, smog and greenhouse-gas pollutants. For more information on the plan, click here.

Next, let’s hope that Toronto and other municipalities tackle incineration to deal with all that garbage waste that cannot be composted or recycled. Burning this material generates energy as well, and the processes can be controlled in a way that doesn’t contaminate the environment (read about it here). That would save us a heck of a lot of money (and, of course, climate-impacting CO2) compared to trucking garbage to landfills. C’mon Canada, Japan is doing it, Denmark is doing it… we can do it!

I joined leagues of litter-gatherers yesterday in the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup, a national event held each September. I registered to join cleaner-uppers at David A. Balfour park in Toronto, one of dozens of the city’s sites that were cleaned up yesterday.

I’ve never seen a bunch of people so happy to be picking up trash. As we braved the stream, muddied our clothes and broke a sweat lugging heavy garbage around, we were grossed out by what people had tossed in the park, but delighted in our achievement: making the park a nicer place for everyone and everything.

For me it was more than that – it felt really nice to be among a group of like-minded people, concerned not only with the trash but with the wildlife trying to make a go of it in a city ravine, and in awe of the natural beauty all around us. I’ll be back next year for more shoreline cleanups!

So what kinds of garbage did I pick from the mud, the stream, from among the forest-floor vegetation? All kinds of litter people had thoughtlessly tossed from a bridge, from their car, let slip from their hands. The trash included:
- Cigarette butts and filters (the No. 1 type of litter picked up in 2009)
- Plastic packaging from cigarette cartons
- Beverage bottles and cans
- Plastic bags
- Many bottles’ worth of broken glass (I really tried to pick up all the little shards, motivated by the image an fox running through the park, slicing its paw on the glass)
- Plastic straws (Remind me why we need those?)
- Bits of clothing
- Part of an aluminum bed frame
- The base for a construction sign
- Bits of plant pots, plant trays and plant markers

I often do little garbage cleanups of my own. Click here to read my previous post on the gear you need to do your own.

Have you ever helped clean up a public space?
Do you have any ideas about how we can reduce the amount of litter in our communities?

Depending on what’s recyclable in your municipality, choosing better packaging can mean less in the landfill. Here are 10 switches you can make:

1. Choose juice boxes over juice pouches. When shopping for back-to-school lunch items, go for juice boxes. Tetra paks are recyclable in many areas, while pouches are not.

2. Select loose tea or tea in paper tea bags over pyramid bags. Loose tea and conventional tea bags can be composted or added to your green bin, whereas pyramid bags, often made with nylon, have to go in the garbage. See my earlier post on this here.

3. Try milk cartons over milk bags. I wasn’t sure about this one, since it no doubt takes more energy to produce a carton than a bag. But, at least where I live, cartons can be recycled while bags cannot.

4. Choose popcorn over chips. OK, this might be harder if you really love chips, but chip bags and tubes aren’t recyclable, whereas microwave popcorn bags can actually be composted, and air-popped popcorn has no waste at all (especially if you buy the popcorn in bulk using a reuseable bag, such as this type. Besides, popcorn is a healthy whole grain, so as long as you take it easy on the butter, your waistline will thank you for making the switch!

5. Go for cookies loose in a bag, or make your own. Plastic cookie trays (and cracker trays) are not recyclable.

6. Buy loose fruit and vegetables. Plastic clamshell packaging isn’t always recyclable, and when loose produce is available you can pick and choose each piece and reduce your plastic consumption. Skip the thin plastic bags at the store and put your produce in one of these reusable options.

7. Buy meat from the butcher counter. Skip the foam trays and plastic wrap and get your (locally raised) meats wrapped in butcher paper. While some places can recycle the foam trays, the little absorbent pad that goes under the meat is simply garbage.

8. Select eggs in paper cartons. Again, many municipalities can’t recycle plastic egg cartons, and foam cartons may be recyclable but are made from petroleum. Paper egg cartons are often made from recycled paper! Alternatively, you can use paper egg cartons for seed starting.

9. Paper trumps plastic for bread. Not only are plastic bread bags not recyclable, nor are those little clips that hold the bag shut.

Do you have any tips on shopping a little greener?

It’s spring cleaning time! And spring really needs it. I was driving across part of “the corridor” – that stretch of 401 highway between Toronto and Montreal, and man, did I see a lot of garbage. Garbage from cars and trucks!

Sure, you walk down the street, you see the odd bit of garbage, especially in early spring. But when I made a brief stop at a carpooling parking lot, I saw this:

And this:

Worse, try to take a walk along the side of the road. As my dad, Don Ross, noted in a report on porosity of the 401 highway regarding wildlife crossing (created for the Ontario Ministry of Transportation), “The quantity of trash and refuse along the shoulders and right of way is staggering. It is literally possible to walk the length of the road stepping from plastic bottle to plastic bottle. Plastic drink bottles have replaced the styrofoam cups as the number two item on the roadside. Many are half full of the most vile smelling liquid you could imagine, as if there were no rest stops from Toronto to Montreal. The most common item is fragments of tires — rusting wire and rubber chunks that are truly a solid band along the shoulders. There are work gloves every few metres, blown out of the backs of trucks, socks, tarpaulins, pieces of wrecked furniture, shoes, underwear, Tim Hortons cups, glass bottles, books, bottle caps, fast food wrappers, stir sticks, paint cans, hub caps, license plates, bungee cords, windshield wipers, paper bags, plastic bags, mattresses, sweat pants, cds, cassette tapes and virtually anything one could ever imagine. The roadside is a minefield of litter and wreckage.”

Ugg. I’m sorry my dad had to document that. Roadsides make up part of habitat, but they’re not much of place to live (let alone drink, or eat) when they’re covered in stuff that came through a car window.

So, what can we do? Of course it’s dangerous to honk at drivers who litter. (Yes, I’m one of those annoying people who has approached a litterbug on the street, their chip bag or cigarette pack wrapper in hand, and said, “I think you dropped this!”)

But we can get out there with a few friends and clean up. Perhaps, as noted by the “broken window” theory and other studies on vandalism, when the roadsides are clean, people won’t treat them like a garbage dump. Here’s an earlier post about what I find helpful when doing a garbage cleanup.

Have you ever come face to face with a litter bug?

My friend Allan alerted me to this BBC News piece about an interesting trash experiment called “Trash Track” being conducted by MIT researchers. They have developed tags that are sort of like simple cell phones, able to report their location into a central system. Volunteers can put these trash tags in their waste – in a coffee cup, for example – and then follow the journey of the garbage on a map to see where it goes. Already underway in Seattle, the project will also run in New York and London, UK.

One of the goals of the project is to help people maintain a connection with trash, to see how it doesn’t just disappear when it leaves us. While those who live rurally often have to cart their own trash to a dump, and they’ll see it build up over time, city dwellers don’t typically see accumulated trash. (Although Torontonians are getting our own version of city dumps right now, with a garbage strike that’s created unsightly piles of trash in city parks.)

Ack! I cringe at the thought of everything I’ve ever thrown out blinking away on a map, forever.

I’ve just returned to Toronto from Tokyo, and after visiting an enormous yet pristine city where you’d find it a challenge to spot litter anywhere, it’s particularly sad to see my home sullied by garbage. It’s only been 11 days since the start of a municipal strike that’s caused the shutdown of garbage, green bin (compost) and recycling services, among other city services. And already, city parks have become designated dumping zones. It really bugs me that we create so much waste that we can’t hold on to it for a while. Eleven days is nothing – not even two garbage collection cycles. I thought I’d share a few ideas to help control the amount of garbage we produce, and I’ve love to add your ideas to the list.

Ideas for reducing garbage volume:
- Eat more fruit and vegetables that don’t have waste. There’s little if any waste in (unwrapped) broccoli, snow peas, strawberries and mushrooms… compared to bananas, oranges and corn.
- If you eat meat, buy it from a butcher so you can get it wrapped in paper instead of on a foam tray, wrapped in plastic.
- Buy milk in bags, rather than cartons.
- Buy juice in concentrate rather than in cartons or plastic jugs
- Head to the bulk food section for foods such as nuts, snacks, cereals so you can skip the boxed goods.
- Still have an air popper? Switch back to it and save the packaging in microwave popcorn.
- Look for paper or foil alternatives to plastic tubs, such as foil-wrapped butter and cream cheese in cardboard.

How do you cut down on waste?

I took this photo of an incineration tower from a building in Ebisu Garden Place, Tokyo. It was one of many towers visible by scanning the city from above. There were no visible emissions coming from the stacks.

Upon arriving at my friends’ place here in Tokyo, my tour of the apartment included the trash facilities – the choices are combustible and non-combustible, and I believe PET bottles and aluminum cans are separated as well. So that’s it, all the combustibles are burned right here in the city, rather than trucking them out to the countryside. To make that work, the facilities would have to be clean, the emissions would have to be contained, or certainly people in this well-organized, clean city would complain.

According to this Washington Post article, one of the plants burns 300 tons of garbage a day, and actually creates electricity for use in the surrounding area from the process, as well as an ash that can be used in building materials.

I’ve often wondered if incineration would be a good choice for Canada’s cities – my view of the Tokyo skyline left no doubt.

How do you think we could manage waste better?

Stopping at a parkway pull-off area to take in the view of the St. Lawrence River on the weekend, my partner and I made our way to the shoreline and sat on some of the glacier-scraped, pink and black granite of the Canadian Shield. While enjoying the sound of the waves and the fresh breezes, a few bits of litter caught my eye. The water bottle, bit of foam and shreds of plastic bags seemed very out of place.

I recalled the “broken window” theory in which, as described by Malcolm Gladwell, “disorder invites even more disorder — that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality.” Suddenly, in my mind, a few bits of litter became a future garbage dump in one of my most sacred places.

The site is not an official park, so it doesn’t come with municipal services such as garbage collection. It’s “pack-in, pack-out” or you bring it, you take it with you. I’ve seen people quite irritated by this, but it makes sense to me that when someone consumes a food item or other packaged good, as soon as that item is open the packaging shouldn’t become the responsibility of the state. The consumer should be able to take responsibility to dispose of it appropriately. If they don’t want to do that, they should be more concerned with packaging before they purchase.

I think that the annual TD Great Shoreline Cleanup is a great event, but there’s no need to wait until September to put the gloves on. No doubt the job will need to be done again, unfortunately!

Luckily we had some gloves and a few bags in the car, so I picked up dozens of cigarette butts, several water bottles and pop cans, a pair of socks, some newspaper, coffee cup lids, napkins, orange peels, even a shred of one of those tubes designed for towing behind a boat. It took about 15 minutes to cover the site; hopefully it looked too good for littering when we left.

Have you done a litter cleanup? Do you think cleaning the site helps keep it cleaner in the future?

Be prepared for a litter cleanup anywhere, anytime by assembling this kit:
- Clear (preferably biodegradeable) bags for recyclables
- Opaque (preferably biodegradeable) bags for garbage
- Green bags for organic waste (if you have a means of composting it)
- Pair of washable or disposable gloves
Pack everything in a shoe box you can use to collect broken glass and other sharp objects.

Looking for a way to connect with your neighbours and do something environmentally helpful in your own backyard? Why not sign up for the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup? Now in its 16th year, the national program run by the Vancouver Aquarium offers an organized way for thousands of people to descend on parks, ravines, shorelines and other natural spaces that, unfortunately, become littered with trash. Last year, volunteers picked up more than 130,000 kg of garbage. Sign up and pick a site near you to clean up, or claim a new zone and be a site coordinator!

The event runs September 19-27, and thousands of people are needed. To register, visit the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup site.

This will be my first year to participate. I’ve wandered a roadside, garbage bag in hand, on my own before, but it will be fun to meet some new people in my community and face the litter together. I hope that a place made more beautiful inspires others to keep it that way.

Have you done a cleanup in your community? I’d love to hear about the kinds of things you found and whether you feel your efforts had a lasting effect.

What’s left in the garbage when you can recycle and compost?

I’ve been composting for the past few months since I moved from an apartment to a house. My partner and I are pretty good at making sure everything recyclable goes into the right bin. So if it’s not compostable or recyclable, what is it?

Looking at the small bag of stuff I was about to take to the trash — the first full kitchen bag we produced in three weeks — I realized that what was inside was all plastic. It’s full of plastic bags and wrappings that stuff comes in.

Some of these bags may be recyclable, but without any symbols on them, I can’t be sure.

Does anyone know if bags you put produce in count? Do you have a better way of bagging produce at the store?

When I was a kid, sometimes my mom would send my lunch in reused bags from English muffins, milk and so forth. Wasn’t she smart?! Other kids got fresh new paper bags, which they threw out everyday. Maybe I’ll try reusing some of those bags for lunches and snacks.