THUNDER BAY – “Clean, Green, and Beautiful” – “Don’t be Trashy”, all the messages are there to help spread the word that we should care for our city. However, it seems over and over that message is lost on many in our city.
Our apparent love affair with single-use coffee cups and take-out containers leave our city, come spring looking like a massive trash dump.
Solutions?
Thunder Bay should be looking at real solutions here. One that comes to mind is that a ten-cent deposit on non-refillable beverage cups that are not biodegradable. If the restaurants were to pay out that deposit to people who returned those cups, one can be assured it would not be very long before all of those cups and litter were picked up.
Thunder Bay City Council could also make it a condition of a business licence for a company using disposable non-biodegradable cups and take-out containers to be responsible for the area around their restaurants.
Thunder Bay could also pass a by-law that requires biodegradable takeout containers.
It is early February. In a few months as the snow melts, Thunder Bay is going to need a lot of work to make our city look clean, green and beautiful. Perhaps it is time for City Council to consider taking needed steps, being pro-active, and preventing the mess from getting out of hand in the first place.
It is actually smart business for companies to start using environmentally smart products. In the long-run the benefits are far greater than the costs.
Simple solutions now could prevent more serious problems in the future.
James Murray