It was with great sadness that I learned of the closing of Rebound in Almonte recently.

Rebound was the furniture and household goods arm of The Hub, which, as everyone knows, or should know, is the grandmother of reuse in Lanark County. The Hub handles mainly clothing and small items, and returns more than $50,000 to the community every year.

Rebound was started a little less than 20 years ago, at about the same time as I was getting the REAL Deal Reuse Store going in Smiths Falls for the Rideau Environmental Action League (REAL).

Tweed Incineration Request

I was equally saddened (and frustrated) to learn that the municipality of Tweed, just down Highway 7, had sent out a request to colleague municipalities to endorse a motion to support waste incineration, or pyrolysis, for small town and rural municipalities.

I know I have too much gray hair, but I’m truly sick and tired of having to address this concept every few years. It’s true, we face landfills and dumps filling up and big cities looking to create new monster landfills in rural areas in Ontario. The appeal used to sell the idea is often around the myth that they create much-needed electricity or energy. They don’t. It has been accurately said that it would be far less expensive and less problematic to run around and change all the lightbulbs in our homes than to build an incineration plant — and produce the same amount of electricity.

The list of reasons to not use incineration is well known, and includes air pollution and human health effects, high amortization costs to the municipality, and negative impacts on better waste reduction efforts.

So, what then do we do?

We all know the answer: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

But we need to do this with serious, systemic intent.

Rebound was part of the Reuse piece in Almonte and area. The challenge for Rebound is that it couldn’t afford the rent on the space it required. This is a common challenge for all reuse operations. (Clothing is the only reuse item that makes substantial money. And even though we have lots of clothing reuse options, often run by non-profit organizations, we still send approximately 85% of clothing and fabrics to landfill.)

All other reuse operations have support in some way from municipal governments. In this area, virtually every municipality has some sort of reuse option for furniture, other household goods, and often some building materials — in other words, for materials that aren’t the easiest to put into the Reuse stream. Lanark Highlands and Tay Valley operate two of the best known and largest reuse operations; Drummond North Elmsley runs another. The REAL Deal store is operated by the environmental non-profit REAL in Smiths Falls. Perth has a very tiny operation and is short of volunteers.

The municipality often provides the building — though not necessarily the heat! All of them are dependent on volunteers, and those volunteers are a hardy committed bunch, often sorting in the cold of winter.

I have often found this unconscionable. When so many companies can make good money off garbage, why should the Reuse component be left for the non-profit and volunteer sector to struggle with?

This gets back to the issue of serious intent. It would have been far better for Tweed to call for a substantive provincial and municipal government approach to Reuse to put it on a self-sustaining basis, rather than call for incineration. And now, with the closure of Rebound, Mississippi Mills will have to integrate more garbage into its management than it did before. Where will well-intentioned people with good stuff to donate take it now?

Climate Carbon Calculations

Many of us fail to understand that the carbon dioxide we have produced in making all these materials over the past 200+ years has simply been adding up in the atmosphere, creating the crisis we are in today. We really don’t need to be “wasting” that embodied energy, the embodied carbon, and frankly all that embodied human skill and creativity.

When I was born, the carbon content of the atmosphere was 314 parts per million. Today it is 421ppm. Every time I fly, or use my gasoline mower, or buy something new, I am adding to the carbon content. It doesn’t draw down, it doesn’t reset to zero on January 1, it just keeps adding up. So the more we can reuse materials, the less new carbon we inject into the atmosphere.

While it’s true that hardly anyone today wants to buy Grandma’s huge china sideboard, it would be wonderful to think we would appreciate the wood, the skill that went into building it, and that we could reuse the materials in it at least! And not waste the carbon that was generated making it.

Finally, if there is another argument against incineration, it is this, from a colleague: “Serious diversion takes out organics and recyclables from the waste stream, in effect leaving just plastics as the main combustible residue, and that is why the international plastics industry (along with the main oil producers) are the main promoters of incineration — the same industry that has constantly put the brakes on the proposed treaty on plastics.”

Aside from all those reasons, citizens don’t want incinerators or pyrolysis plants.

In this region alone, we have seen the expensive and wasteful failure of the Plasco Energy plant in Ottawa; and the citizen-led demise of similar proposals in Mississippi Mills, Burnstown, and Pontiac County across the river in Quebec. All of these were proposed or broadly suggested to handle the garbage from Lanark County.

Let’s recommit to Reuse — to donating good materials and to buying them or getting them for free from the various municipal operations! And for municipalities to stop being swayed by the shiny object of incineration and instead get serious about Reuse.

A note to donors to reuse operations: Please, if you’re donating, be kind to the volunteers — don’t give them your wet, dirty, soiled bags of stuff. This happens far too often, I just heard of such an example again today. Please donate only materials that are truly reuseable.