I put a poll on my blog asking "How much waste does the average Kamloopian Produce?" In case you are not familiar with BC or Canada (I notice that there are lots of people from New Zealand visiting my blog), Kamloops is my home town, thus the term Kamloopian.
Okay... so the answer to my poll question is this: the average Kamloopian produces 1.2 tonnes of waste per year. Wow, thats a lot of garbage! And I can assure you that this information is pretty accurate as I calculated it myself. Well, not really, the City of Kamloops keeps pretty good records of what goes into the Mission Flats landfill and I did a little math (total waste/ total population = per capita waste generation).
Compare that to the waste generation rate in the State of California, 400 kg/capita, and it doesn't look very good.
Which leads to my next question, why do we (in Kamloops) produce so much more garbage than the people in California? Do they have better recycling? Are they poorer so they buy less stuff? Or are we just a bit more wasteful than our friends in the South?
If there is anyone out there from California, please enlighten us. I welcome any comment on this subject so please feel free... I am all ears.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that California has a significantly higher population (about the size of Canada) and given the cities, would probably have a greater density. While I'm not sure how/if this would account for household waste, it would spread out the industrial waste over a great population, thus lowering their per capita production? Just a thought.
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@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to read my blog and post comments.
Ont he subject of Californian waste generation rates:
Per capita waste generation rates are for household waste only. The calculation is total population divided by total household waste, which means that the rate is for each person.
Maybe they have better diversion programs? Maybe they just consume less? Do you know anyone who lives in California?
It may be that Californians are more waste conscious and have a much better recycling program in place than Kamloops currently has. I was travelling California this past summer and they have a lot more recycle and waste reduction programs in place. Being green in California is more apart of their
ReplyDeleteConsciousness and viewed as a good thing to do. Unfortunately Our local government does not give it much significance. Multi-family housing complexes do not have recycling available. No programs exist for restaurants to be part of a composting program. Many office buildings do not have bins for paper recycling. They have blue boxes collecting paper recycling but they dump them into regular garbage bins because only cardboard bins or regular garbage bins are the only options provided onsite.