Love to Recycle?

I attend events for a living. I talk to people, and try to educate them. I tell them about recycling, and what our containers turn into when they're recycled. It's a laid back and fun job, but often it is disheartening. Most people aren't interested in learning, only lured in by our giveaways. It's so hard to truly get through to them, to change their behavior.
Recycling is at the forefront of our awareness these days. It is the most famous R; reduce and reuse haven't quite caught on. To me recycling should be the last resort when dealing with our waste. But as we live in a world diminated by convenience and single use products, reducing and reusing aren't really options. Recycling is the easiest and most widely applicable, and that is why it is gaining the most popularity. Almost every municipality has its own recycling facility, and they can vary substancially.  In Edmonton for example they have an Integrated Processing and Transfer facility that receives the municipal waste. It is then sorted into three streams: compostable, recyclables, and garbage. That garbage is essentially burned to generate engery to power their biofuel facility, which produces ethanol. Their goal is to divert 90% of their waste by 2015.
In Calgary we have blue and black bins in our alleys. The blue bins are for mixed recycling which is then separated at the Cascades Recovery facility. It is first manually sorted then automatically.  Disc screens remove cardboard, and optic lenses scan for and separate different types of plastic. There is a proccess to separate all types of materials which are then bailed and sold on the commodity market. 

Calgary is also in the middle of setting up their compost program, something I am looking forward to. 50% of Calgary's municipal solid waste is yard or food waste ending up in the landfill and putrifying.  As landfill space is becoming sparser, cities must look for ways to mitigate waste. Great innovations are making that easier, but there remains the issue of mass production, single use and non-recyclables.

As I stated earlier, I attend events for a living and I've seen some sad things. In big groups people tend to lose their sense of accountability. I recently worked at Color Me Rad in Edmonton, and I was appauled at the lack of waste mitigation efforts. They were selling aerosol cans of paint powder that really only worked for a minute and then were trash. They were also selling and giving out small plastic pouches of paint dust for their color bombs. It was all fun and games at first but as the day progressed and I went to check on our beverage container recycling bins we had provided, I saw a lack of  foresight and a disregard for the environment. The bins had been placed lazily; 6 recycling bins around one garbage, and too few bins near the dasani water stations or coconut water tent. So what wasn't just littered on the ground was put in the wrong bins.  I spend hours dumpig out 4/5ths full waters and coconut water cans and putting them in the recycling while the spectators continued to throw them in the garbage. It was a very disheartening day. When everyone left the carnage was extensive. Thousands of plastic baggies and waterbottles littered the large parking lot. It seemed they were sweeping it all into piles with street cleaning vehicles so to save the recyclables we spent some more hours picking up everyone and putting them in bags and rounding them up for who knew who to cash them in.  Atleast I hope they were recycled and not just tossed in with the garbage bags.
That event jaded and disheartened me, but I must keep fighting to educate the public and try and make things better. It is just sad that such popular events have no interest in waste reduction. It makes me respect companies like DIG so much more, because they are truly dedicated to greening up events and festivals.