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Well, here we are – summer is behind us and the cooler, hopefully wetter, months of autumn are ahead. As you will already have noticed if you showed up at the depot on Wednesday, we are closed on Wednesdays for the fall, winter and spring. Many people have voiced their appreciation of the depot being open for that one extra day to bring in your recycling. We will be meeting as a board at the end of September to evaluate the Wednesday opening. I suspect it will be reinstated next summer. But some of the comments made to depot staff indicated that Wednesday/Saturday openings as opposed to the current Friday/Saturday openings might be a better pattern (prior to Covid, the depot was open Wed/Sat – some new residents might not know this). I am sure that this will be a topic for discussion at the board meeting so if you have any thoughts on this, please express these ideas to the depot staff or by email to [email protected] so we have an idea of how you, our patrons, might like to see the depot become more efficient.
And the Rethinking contest has come to a close. We have some very good ideas to consider and will be doing so at the board meeting as well. Winners will be announced and contacted soon. It was very interesting to get some informal thoughts from depot patrons as the contest was explained. A common theme was that many of the people, most who are retired, found thinking to be quite painful, and Rethinking would be downright excruciating. These responses, I am quite sure, were meant to be a jocular response to a simple task (I could see myself responding in a like manner if I was the one being asked to Rethink a concept). That being said, some of the responses that were actually written and submitted blew me away. Some among us had thoughts that could, and maybe should, take recycling to the next level. I was fortunate enough to have attended the Conservancy fundraiser where Dr. David Suzuki spoke very eloquently about the state of the world in terms of the direction the human race is taking. There were many brilliant points made but the one that stuck with me the most was his observations that we acquire so much ‘stuff’ that we obviously feel we need when we buy it, but ultimately don’t really need so it is discarded. Guilty as charged – my wife would most certainly attest to this. How do we curb our buying patterns? Even Dr. Suzuki did not have the answer to this conundrum but I felt that all in the room agreed that something must be done. And in closing – SORT, SORT, SORT. Throughout the summer it became very obvious that the sorters amongst us were in and out of the depot in no time flat; the ‘jam-it-all-into-a-garbage-bag’ folks, not so much. See you at the depot. - Richard Jarco |