The global financial meltdown has hit the green movement hard, right here in our back yard. Everything that goes into your blue box for recycling is sold to mills, usually offshore, who process it and sell it to the factories that make the cheap consumer goods we love. This works well when commodity prices and consumer demand are high. Now, both of those indices have tanked, and municipalities are forced to stockpile the materials gathered. Which is a real shame, as local recycling companies were beginning to take us a lot closer to the cradle-to-cradle manufacturing model our bulging landfills so desperately need. So how can we help?
First, we need to increase demand for recycled content in everything we buy. And wouldn’t it be great if we could knowingly choose goods that were helping us with our own trash problem? Of course that would take a domestic recycling and manufacturing industry. Which would employ people, and might actually be a decent use of government stimulus dollars… but is still likely a long way off. So I guess it’s not quite a marketing job just yet.
Unless you include the sell-job we have to do on the Canadian Government to get them to subsidize recycling plants instead of tar sands plants.
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