Dear editor,
I would like to support the excellent letter submitted by J. Anderson on the issue of compulsory carts for re-cycling and composting materials. Council has made a serious mistake in implementing this program which is both unfair and also counter productive with respect to environmental sustainability.
It is extremely unfair to those of us who have deliberately tried to reduce our production of waste of all kinds. This is particularly true of most senior citizens who not only produce much less waste but are usually on fixed incomes and find it increasingly difficult to service the constantly increasing user fees and property taxes levied by the Town.
In our own case we barely produce enough garbage to cover the bottom of our weekly garbage pick up and only have to recycle every five or six weeks. We also went out and purchased our own composting bin on the advice of the Town.
If council really wants to encourage greater environmental responsibility in the Town, surely the last thing that they should be doing is punishing those who have been doing their best to reduce their production of waste materials. Most logical folks would consider that rewarding them would have been a more intelligent thing to do.
Beyond that Council seems to have forgotten that their own slogan refers to Reducing, Re-using and Recycling. Recycling is the least useful of those activities in that in many cases all we are doing is moving unwanted material from one place to another.
Forcing people to pay for bins that we neither need nor want will certainly not encourage any of us to Reduce or Re-use. Think again Council.
Chris Mills
Okotoks
