Coffee Cups and South Korea

Oh, I know I know, I've been VERY bad. But here I am, finally, with a 2009 enviro-rant.

The City of Toronto recently released its packaging report in which it targeted a number of items that clog our parks, streams, rivers and even landfills, for taxation. Plastic bags, plastic water bottles, and the venerated roll up the rim coffee cup. All were slated to be slapped with a levy.

Hail Loblaws, I can't believe I'm saying that, for having the stones to be the first retailer to flip the bird to plastic bags, and start charging people to use them. The other big boxes are set to roll over on this too.

So what about paper coffee cups? Seems Tim Horton's et al think the cups should be recyclable (currently, they are kind of, except too many people leave the plastic lids on them when they pitch them in the blue box, and consequently 'contaminate' the resulting recycled material... nobody wants that, especially packaging manufacturers). They believe the City should spend 5 million bucks to update their machinery to accept these blights on society into their recycling stream.

Here's the thing Tim Horton's. Your customers are using paper cups rather than reusable cups... they should pay, not me, the lowly tax payer who only touches a Tim Horton's cup when I pick it up on Earth Day from my local park or stream. But instead, Tim Horton's is stonewalling and likely threatening to sue the City if they proceed with a plan to slap a 5 cent levy on every disposable cup sold.

Bastards. And to boot, seems the only market for recycled paper cups is South Korea. Now that's brilliant. We pay $5 million bucks to update machinery to accept something that could be eliminated from the stream completely if lazy people would just start carrying a reusable mug. And then we process said thing, and ship the resulting pulp 1/2 way around the world to South Korea, so they can fashion it into more junk we don't need and sell it back to us. WTF? The whole world has lost its head...