Give Waste a New Life

Like all residents, I recently received my new Waste Sorting Guide at my home.

We need to remove plastics from the green bag to fulfill Ministry of the Environment’s requirements and be ready for when Guelph’s new state-of-the-art Organic Waste Processing Facility opens its doors this fall.  The guide explains the changes we need to make to our sorting.

What I liked about the guide was the recycling and composting facts because they make the impact of our efforts in the home real.  For instance:

• It takes only 25 two-litre plastic bottle to make one adult-sized fleece jacket and Guelph recycled the equivalent of 670,000 jackets last year alone
• The paper we recycled is enough to make over 23,000 egg cartons
• We recycled over 1000 tonnes of glass which would take 4000 years to decompose in a landfill
• Composting our food waste will reduce green house gases equivalent to removing 3440 passenger cars from the road