Post Carbon Fellow Bill Sheehan was quoted in this article Ontario’s new waste policies.

From the article:

Picture it: town dump, turn of the 19th century. When municipalities finally started caving in to citizen calls to rid laneways and back alleys of festering trash, cities were mostly hauling away buckets of sewage and coal ash from stoves. Fast-forward to today and Bill Sheehan of the Product Policy Institute says a whopping 75 per cent of municipal solid waste is manufactured goods: mattresses, high chairs, TVs, stryofoam cups, you name it…

Sheehan calls the system “welfare for waste.” He says we shouldn’t be surprised that repair shops are vanishing, that products are effectively designed for the dump. In shelling out for free trash collection, Sheehan notes, local governments have become the “enablers of a throwaway society.”

Zero-wasters want to see the bill and even the products themselves returned to sender. The good news is that a growing number of waste honchos seem to be listening…

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Waste image via bringo/flickr