JUST IN TIME
Waste Not, Want Not
}} Recycling and reusing in Kawartha Lakes
IAN McKECHNIE Writer-at-large
drive shaft was a treasure coveted and used over It’s a grey Thursday afternoon in late April as I sit down and over ... Unwanted field stones were piled up into to write this column, a few hours after Miller Waste’s useful walls; unmerchantable tree brush was burned chocolate brown and caramel-coloured garbage trucks to produce saleable potash. Ontario started without have made their rounds through Lindsay and other comrefuse, and with barely the concept of it.” (Entire buildmunities across the municipality. ings could be recycled: in 1888, red bricks previously Stopping at the foot of driveways and laneways, the used in the Grand Trunk Railway’s Port Hope roundorange-clad garbage collectors remove not only clear house were brought to Lindsay and used to build the bags of refuse, but also the contents of our blue boxes. engine sheds between Durham and Albert Streets.) These familiar plastic containers — distinguished by three white arrows arranged to look like they are in perpetual motion — brim over with our aluminum cans, our glass bottles and any number of plastic packaging materials. On alternate weeks, the Miller trucks collect fibrous materials — cardboard and newspaper — from similarly-sized green boxes. Once the boxes have been emptied, we return them to our garages or apartments and let them fill up again, knowing that we will be repeating the same ritual next week. We call this process recycling, and while we may have a vague awareness of how it works and why it is important, we seldom think about how it came to be and just how sigJohn’s Cartage began in 1963. Photo: Courtesy Al Hussey. nificant the blue box was when first introduced to this community a little over 30 years ago. The “reduce, reuse, recycle” concept persisted, The intervening years, of course, have taught us that even though nobody used the word recycling. “Handrecycling is far from being a solution to our waste problem me-downs, pronounced to sound like one word, was a — a problem that’s entirely of our own modern creation. more common term,” observes historian Rae Fleming, Of course, the concept of “reduce, reuse, recycle” has who grew up in the Argyle general store. “Sweaters been around for generations. went from one child to the next, and so on, until worn University of Toronto emeritus professor Thomas out, but not thrown out. The yarn could be used to McIlwraithe, in his study Looking for Old Ontario, notes that knit socks, or for filling in quilts and so on. ‘Waste not, “In the farm-making era Ontarians recycled everything. want not,’ was a common expression well into the Every brick, skillet, spoon, pickle crock, millstone and second half of the 20th century.”
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