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Recycling centre funding for employment, not environment

An announcement Sept.

An announcement Sept. 11 that the Thompson Recycling Centre would receive funding from the federal and provincial governments through Canada's Economic Action Plan, part of the Stephen Harper government's $4-billion dollar Infrastructure Stimulus Fund should be good news, not only for the staff at the Thompson Recycling Centre, but also for environmentally conscious Thompsonites, local builders and, of course, the environment.

But is it?

For the recycling centre staff, absolutely, considering the facility as it exists now is cramped, dirty and certainly doesn't scream out green.

For locals concerned about the environment and the environment itself, the impact is not so clear.

Truthfully, being both an environmentalist and a Thompsonite is a bit of an oxymoron. In a city where there are as many as 240 below-freezing days per year, it's pretty hard to reduce the toll it takes on the environment to heat your home and warm up your car without, well, packing up to Arizona for the winter, where your air conditioner will probably do just as much damage. Sure, the fact that Manitoba Hydro generates electricity using the renewable waters of the province helps, but there's no getting around the fact that every bit of electricity consumed here - at subsidized rates - can't be exported to other jurisdictions that rely on dirtier sources of energy, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, which many scientists agree are a bad thing, especially if they get too high, The fact that it isn't Thompson's fault is irrelevant because there's only one environment. If it's bad for the ecosystem in the United States, it affects us here, too.

The good to the environment that comes from recycling is difficult to quantify, but it's safe to say that in Thompson, the net benefit is negligible, a result mainly of geography and isolation. Take, for example, a bottle. Manufactured elsewhere, say Winnipeg, it must then be placed on a truck and driven nearly 800 kilometres to reach consumers here. If a Thompsonite dutifully recycles this bottle, it will then be placed on another truck to make the trip south again to a manufacturing facility where it can be processed into something else, with the local recycling centre likely taking a loss in the transaction, unless it happens to be a time when raw material prices are very high. This life cycle is only good for the environment if the return trip and re-processing consume less energy than obtaining new materials and making a brand new bottle. Otherwise, unfortunately, it's just a waste of money and gas.

Recycling has become a symbol of how much value on places on the environment that borders on the religious. Only a Neanderthal would throw away cardboard. What happens instead? We buy giant new TVs, drop the old ones off at an e-waste depot, put the boxes in the recycling bin and head to the drive-thru in oversized cars, picking up coffee on the way to work just like each of our co-workers, each in a separate car, feeling good about how we helped the environment.

The truth is, recycling is the last of the three Rs, after reducing and re-using. It can't save the environment on its own. From an environmental standpoint, an expanded recycling centre will likely do far, far less for Mother Nature than the funding announced at the same time that will go towards expanding and upgrading bike and walking paths in Winnipeg. Besides, we live in a town where mining is still king. A blue box on every doorstep in Thompson won't make up for that, which doesn't mean that mining is bad. It just has a negative effect on the environment, which either is or isn't compensated for by the positive effects, depending upon your perspective. But, when you look at the government funding for an expanded recycling centre in Thompson, accept it for what it is: a job-creation initiative, not part of a green revolution.

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