Sunday, January 26, 2020

The Globes editorial on recycling

The new Globe editorial editor Bina Venkataraman wrote a piece on recycling and how Amazon should be paying their fair share of the costs to recycle their packaging. As she wrote, recycling is not free and is costing us now and in the future way more than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. E-commerce has certainly made the problem worse and is an important contributor to the costs that municipalities and the eventually the tax payer has to spend to get rid of the materials.
There is a bill filed last year by Michael Day that would create the Sustainable Packing Advisory Board which would create a schedule for the collection of fees from producers of printed paper and packaging and would exclude small producers and beverage containers.

I can't imagine any company in the world, let alone Amazon would ever pay any attention to such a law. The lobbyists would kill it before it even got to committee.
The answer is not on the Hill, but in every City and Town by residents who will consider what they buy and how it comes packaged and how they recycle it.

It's time for our elected municipal leaders to create a Task Force of all the stakeholders, including residents and find a way to be better at recycling.


5 Comments:

At January 27, 2020 at 9:09 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think that municipal task force idea is spot on. Have you approached the Mayor to as her to create that?

 
At January 27, 2020 at 10:08 AM , Blogger jim pillsbury said...

I've written George about it. He agrees. As we found out, the council can assemble a Task Force to address any number of community issues. Given that the last council chair assembled various task forces, I thought the council should do the same for recycling. I don't see the Mayor getting involved with this, it's not very sexy. I could be wrong but I can't see her standing with a recycle cart any time soon.

 
At January 27, 2020 at 3:45 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

The city does a lousy job of informing residemt when things change. They claim they send things out but I never get them. So they don't inform us and them the pass on the added expenses to us. Not fair.

 
At January 27, 2020 at 3:52 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

I thought I saw on your Facebook event that prescription bottles go in trash but the website wizard says recycle them Which is correct?

 
At January 27, 2020 at 4:58 PM , Blogger jim pillsbury said...

I agree..communicating with the 15k home owners about the correct way to recycle is a huge hurdle.

those scrip bottles Steven said no to even though the web site said yes. My thought was that they were to small and also there's lot of info about patients on them.

 

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