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Excerpt from Michelle Lalonde’s article in the Montreal Gazette (May 5, 2008)

It was all about the smell. A few years ago, I was working on a recycling story that required I take a tour of the St. Michel Environmental Complex. Inside the giant sorting centre of the plant, two things struck me immediately. First, the smell of the place was overpowering and unpleasant. It reeked primarily of sour milk, but with nauseating overtones of other types of rotting food. Secondly, even though much of the operations were mechanized, there were real human beings - and lots of them - standing on the assembly line. These people, most of them young immigrants according to the plant manager, spent their days separating metal from paper or glass by hand.

That first moment in the plant resolved one of many running debates at our house about recycling. We argued about whether there was really any point in rinsing all those milk bags and yogurt containers and tomato sauce cans. We had heard that rinsing was a waste of water and time, since powerful machines at the recycling plant would blast the containers clean eventually anyway.

But that visit made it very clear to me that rinsing is an issue of basic civility. Besides keeping your own green bin cleaner, giving those containers a quick rinse can make working conditions in the sorting plants a little less unpleasant. Besides, if you rinse the containers immediately, before anything has dried or hardened, it doesn’t take much water or time.

Civility.  A word well chosen.   Michelle Lalonde also has her own Green Life blog where she needed to post a few corrections to the above story.  A great site on which I’m sure many people would love to comment, unfortunately you have to login to the Canada.com network etc etc… forget that.

Tags:   Greenlife · Michelle Lalonde · Recycling Center · Rinse · Rotten Milk1 Comment