Tag: Recycling

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Arts and Culture Student Life

Concordia Arts students collaborate to produce a brand-new exhibit out of a recycled one

Ramona Hallemans pats down straw pulp to make book paper at Concordia’s downtown campus. Photo by Julia Israel // The Concordian.

The students of the special topics art course ARTT 399 get a hands-on learning experience about sustainability in art.

On Feb. 14, a group of 45 students brought their class to Concordia’s 4th Space to work collaboratively and display the making of their project to the public. They are making a book using materials they’ve recycled from a previous Public Art and Sustainability student exhibit at Place des Arts Aiguilleurs in Griffintown.

Straw sculptures, financed by the Réseau Express Métropolitain (REM), were erected near the Griffintown REM station in an original student exhibit produced by a cohort of students from multiple universities last summer. This transformation will culminate in a book of poetry and drawings in response to the original student exhibit, commemorating nature lost to city transformation in Griffintown.

Course Teaching Assistant Sabrina Rak said this process imbues the project with transformative power.

“This is really a metaphor, taking the actual straw from the other structure, boiling it with soda ash, and blending it to make paper pulp and making the basis of a book which is paper,” Rak explained.

Sabrina Rak and two students enjoy the messy process of their art over tarp floor lining at Concordia’s downtown campus. Photo by Julia Israel // The Concordian.

Studio Arts student Ramona Hallemans registered for this course to learn practical skills to work in the art industry once they graduate. The class works in collaborating teams on book design, communications, documentation, and grant writing. Hallemans describes this project as one with community collaboration as a central value. 

Ramona Hallemans pats down straw pulp to make book paper at Concordia’s downtown campus. Julia Israel // The Concordian.

The ARTT 399: The Artist as Multi-Hyphenate class will present the exhibit in Concordia’s Visual Arts Visuels (VAV) gallery from May 5 to 11. For updates, follow the course on Instagram at @45_passersby.

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Arts

Canopy: A community project foreseeing a greener society

Courtesy of Madeline Schmidt

Concordia’s Greenhouse hosts a project inspired by a utopian concept, to be presented April 22

After making your way up to the 13th floor of the Hall Building and passing through an inviting doorway, you might suddenly notice the smell of fresh soil as hoses on a “mist” setting crowd your sinuses. An overwhelming presence of life makes itself known; a sort of hidden life, perhaps. 

You’ve stumbled upon Canopy; The Hidden Life of Humans: a project that unites science with arts and crafts in pursuit of the idea that we, as humans, may one day be able to move civilization above the ground into canopies. 

Courtesy of Madeline Schmidt

Maddy Schmidt, who recently graduated from Concordia with a major in design, conceived the idea in August of last year while walking through Montreal and spotting a planter erupting with vines and other vegetation. 

At the same time, Schmidt was listening to a Radiolab podcast about copepods: small crustaceans found in various aquatic habitats, and even in above-ground ecosystems among trees. In their episode Forests On Forests, Radiolab states that about 50 per cent of all terrestrial beings live in trees.

“I saw this crazy web of vines, and they were all linking onto each other. It looks like they’re holding each other. I saw them linking onto the fence,” said Schmidt. “I saw them linking onto other plants. And I was like, there’s this completely interconnected world, it was so mind-blowing.”

The Canopy co-creator immediately called her longtime friend, first-year photography major Liliane Junod, out of inspiration. The “partners in vine” brainstormed ideas for a project honouring the concept of humans living from the top down, rather than the ground up.

Courtesy of Lilly Junod

The idea of the project is to hang all sorts of house plants, such as pothos, also known as devil’s ivy, around the Hall Building’s greenhouse. They would be linked together with grapevines and hung on trellising made from recycled materials. 

The Canopy team is gathering material from Facebook groups that are designated for sharing recycled materials, such as Creative Re-use: Ø Waste, or CRØW.

Canopy will be hosting a workshop in collaboration with Concordia Precious Plastic Project (CP3) and Concordia University’s Centre for Creative Reuse (CUCCR), on April 4 from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.. Anyone is welcome to attend. 

CP3’s portion of the workshop will entail drawing lantern designs and learning how to transform them into illustrator outlines, which will then be cut into recycled plastic sheets with laser-cutters. 

The second part of the workshop, led by CUCCR, will focus on making arts and crafts with recycled materials, and techniques such as sculpting, drawing, painting, and printing will be taught by Concordia’s fine arts students.

“The end result of this project is going to be an exhibition where we create this magical canopy space in the greenhouse, and we’re going to include our artists from the community,” said Junod. “We’re excited to have not just people in fine arts, for whom art is their entire life, but also anybody. So we want to put forth the message that everyone can create for this.”

Courtesy of Lilly Junod

One of the Canopy team’s keywords is optimism, and their goal is to keep the community lighthearted when thinking about the environment.

“We really want this project to be as uplifting as possible,” says Schmidt. “Of course, we’re addressing tons of systemic issues, methodologies, but we’re exposing them through something much more artistic and colourful.”

The Canopy team is calling on any students from the Fine Arts, Arts and Science and JMSB faculties who are willing to lend a hand between now and the day of exhibit on April 22. 

You can visit the project’s Linktree @canopythloh for more information.

Categories
Arts

The CSU is trying to bridge the gap between art students and the rest of the University

Art Swap event at the VA building - Esther Morand/The Concordian

By proposing events such as Art Swaps, the CSU proposes to serve as a ground for the exchange of supplies among students and the general Concordia community

On Sept. 29, the Art Swap series held its first event in the courtyard of the VA building at Concordia’s downtown campus. 

“We figured that having this event in the courtyard would create the sort of traffic that this event would like to cater to,” said Sean Levis, sustainability coordinator for the CSU and co-organizer of this event. 

Thanks to a collaboration with Zero Waste Concordia, Art Hives, the Fine Arts Student Alliance (FASA), and Concordia University’s Centre for Creative Reuse (CUCCR), the CSU was able to make this event possible. 

Art Hives staff and volunteers preparing their stand – Esther Morand/The Concordian

The CSU decided to organize a four-part swap series building off of the Queer and Kids Clothing Swaps that happen every year during the anti-consumerism week. 

The Art Swap is a space “where students are encouraged to either take the art materials that are viable to them or leave any art materials that they don’t use,” Levy noted. 

These events raise awareness around the idea of exchanging, rather than spending.

“The purpose of this event is to get students on campus, exchange different materials and promote a culture of sustainability, discouraging the commercialization of specific products, encouraging gifting and trading,” Levis said. 

Glitter containers – Esther Morand /The Concordian

“The whole point is to avoid buying new things and encourage this cycle of reusing and recycling and overall bring more sustainability on campus,” added Julianna Smith, external affairs and mobilization coordinator for the CSU. 

“There’s been this culture of individualism with the pandemic. This is a community effort to get people to connect, have fun, and promote sustainability on campus,” noted Smith. “On top of that, a lot of these events are trying to involve students to allow them to share common ideas and feel like they belong to a space.”

People painting and crafting at the Art Hives table – Esther Morand/The Concordian

Other spaces like the Art Nook offer students the possibility to make art and use available materials. 

“It’s always open, it’s a free space, where people leave and take supplies, it is an ongoing art supply swapping space,” added Smith. 

The Art Nook is located just behind the CSU offices on the 7th floor of the Hall Building. 

Three other swaps will occur throughout the year. At the beginning of November, there will be a book swap that will feature events such as “dates with books,” where book covers will be covered in brown paper with only short descriptions to accompany them for people to pick up. 

“It’s the idea of not judging a book by its cover,” Levis said. “It’s the idea of the de-commercialization of certain products.” 

There will also be a seed swap in April with the Greenhouse, where planting workshops will occur. 

Lastly, there will be a Black hair-care products swap in February. The workshops will be for people to be able to make their own hair-care products. 

“We are creating specific themes for these events. It’s an effort to reinvigorate student life at the same time,” Levy added. 

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News

Ensemble Montréal wants transparency on recycling

Ensemble Montreal thinks residents should be aware of what the city does with their recycling. KAITLYNN RODNEY/THE CONCORDIAN

An investigation by Radio-Canada’s Enquête earlier this year showed Montreal ships bales of contaminated material to India

Ensemble Montréal, the Opposition party, is planning to present their proposals at the next city council meeting to improve recycling practices in Montreal. These requests come after the report by Enquête, who uncovered shocking recycling practices in Montreal.

Stephanie Valenzuela, city councillor of Ensemble Montréal said, “It’s something that we had been signaling as an opposition government for quite some time, you know. We had even back in December of 2020 to look into the state of recycling here in Montreal, but we got refused.”

Valenzuela stated the process dated back to 2019, when the city invested $487.2 million into new recycling centres that would sort and clean recycled goods efficiently. These recycled goods would then be used for other materials, or be sold to countries and businesses to reuse them.

However, it was found out that bales of recycled goods were being shipped to India full of contaminated material, a lot of which came from Montreal.

“So with the media coming out and actually showing what’s really taking place, there’s a clear lack of transparency on the end of the [Plante] administration,” Valenzuela explained.

The opposition wants to motion at the next council meeting for a meeting with the  environmental department, and ask for monthly reports from Ricova, the recycling company hired by the city of Montreal.

Valenzuela highlighted that these reports will magnify what the recycling problems are and how long they have been going on, so that suggestions for possible solutions can be found.

“However, what I have to say is that obviously what definitely needs to be done without even looking at the statistics is that there has to be improvement in the performance of the sorting infrastructure,” she added.

The Concordian received a written statement in French from the city of Montreal, which discussed its Master Plan for the Management of Residual Materials in the Montreal Agglomeration 2020-2025 (PDGMR), which was implemented in 2020. It intends to work towards: “ prohibiting the distribution of certain single-use plastics (including shopping bags) [and] the deployment of food waste collection [for all buildings with nine or more dwellings, as well as other businesses, institutions and schools].. The city will also fight against food waste by promoting links between businesses and food banks. These efforts make it possible to meet the challenges linked to the environmental crisis”

When asked why these proposals were important, Valenzuela stated that we’re living in a climate crisis, and it is an urgent matter that must be dealt with.

“All Montrealers believe that they’re recycling, but the result of it is that it’s not actually working. […] We need to know what we’re actually engaging ourselves in, because the reality is that we have a lot of things that we need to change when it comes to environmentalism.”

Photo courtesy of the City of Laval

Categories
Student Life

A new way of recycling coffee bean packaging

A recycling project by Ethical Beans and TerraCycle mends the gap in the recycling industry one step at a time

Coffee is not just a drink, it’s a culture, a community, a lifestyle.

And like any lifestyle, you can buy swag. Certain key items you can acquire to help prove to others you aren’t a poser.

The entry-level includes single-use take-out coffee cups, a small drip coffee machine, a French press or a stovetop Italian espresso maker. You can upgrade to a reusable cup, a nice espresso machine at home, and the barista at your local coffee place knowing your name and/or order. And finally, you can call yourself a full-on coffee snob if you buy your own beans.

The highest level of coffee swag — walking home with an aesthetically pleasing bag of coffee beans that cost you between $20 to $30.

In Montreal, there are many different coffee beans you can buy, from Cantook to Café Rico, with distinct flavour profiles. But no matter where you get your beans from, the bags go into the trash and onto the landfill. NO MORE! There is now another solution to help make your morning routine more green.

Ethical Bean, a coffee company established in Vancouver, has partnered with TerraCycle, a global recycling solution conglomerate, to create a new recycling project key to helping the coffee consumer grow greener.

If you haven’t heard of TerraCycle yet, let me have the honour of introducing you. The company’s mission statement is to “eliminate the idea of waste.” It recycles materials in products and reshapes them for reuse. For example, melting down a bunch of plastic single-use packaging to make a new park bench.

Together, they have created a new recycling program that allows consumers of a hot cup a’ joe to participate. All you have to do is sign up for free, fill up any cardboard box lying around with coffee bean bags (perhaps a past Amazon order?), print the free shipping label and off the pretty coffee packaging goes to become something new!

In a city like Montreal, where one in every five people you see is a coffee snob, how will the community engage with this type of program? Will the endless array of coffee shops start recycling their packaging too?

Léa Normandin, an employee at Café Le Loup Bleu, one of Montreal’s “third-wave” coffee locals, is a self-appointed coffee snob. Her qualifications include spending over $20 on coffee beans.

She describes a coffee snob as someone who enjoys their coffee, for whom it isn’t just a drink you have in the morning, it’s the best part of your morning. She said, “Overall, someone who considers coffee as more than just their morning pick-me-up… like myself.”

Normandin sees first hand the kind of waste coffee shops and coffee consumers can create, like “coffee packaging, single-use plastic or cardboard cups when you go out to get coffee, […] not to mention all the waste we create when choosing what goes into our coffee, such as sugar packets, cream [containers], straws, etc.”

Excited at the prospect of new recycling possibilities, Normandin will eagerly take part in the new recycling initiative. The only thing left to do is get the city on board!

 

Graphics by James Fay

How to make paper in a world that refuses to go paperless

We need to stop cutting down trees

There is a specific satisfaction you get from holding a good, solid book in your hands, or flipping through your freshly-printed 10 page essay. A feeling that is not satisfied by holding a Kindle, e-reader, or scrolling through a word doc.

We all know that paper is made from trees, and trees are becoming more scarce. This sad reality can be traced back to the paper product industry, since it accounts for 42 per cent of deforestation worldwide. Paper products such as packaging, cardboard, newspapers, magazines, contracts, and more are responsible for one third of Canada’s waste, and only a quarter of this number ends up being recycled.

It would be dumb to try and deny the importance of forests in the world, especially large old-growth forests that have immense ecosystems of their own. These provide us with oxygen, medicinal plants, and are often home to Indigenous communities, some of which have never had contact with the “modern” world.

Going paperless could be considered in a very “plugged in” setting, but not everyone has access to computers, or even a stable internet connection. Ideally, we could recycle all of our paper, and create a cycle of continuous use without the need for virgin material. But sadly, humans often make the mistake of putting paper in the wrong bin or recycling paper contaminated with food — rendering the paper no longer recyclable and contaminating the rest of the bin it was thrown into — which puts a damper on our plans.

There is a process in which paper is cut up into tiny little pieces, which you can picture like blended paper confetti. Then, it is thrown in water with a solvent, and a mesh frame filters the paper chunks into a unified sheet. The paper is then laid out, dried with sponges, and left out in the open until fully solid.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the most satisfying paper feel is that of a rugged, thick sheet that has rough edges. The recycled paper confetti comes together to form a beautiful speckled cream colour. It’s a calming and beautiful process that could help the paper industry navigate toward reusing instead of chopping.

There are however downsides to recycled paper; it takes an abundant amount of energy to make. But let’s see what the outcome is when we weigh the pros from the cons, according to this BBC Science article:

Cons:

  • Making recycled paper uses fossil fuels for energy instead of burning wood products like regular paper mills do.
  • The cost of recycling and transporting paper waste materials is an issue, including the energy cost of transporting scraps

Pros:

  • Generally speaking, recycling paper is better than making it from scratch since it uses less raw materials, and is able to reuse the resources already used to make the initial product
  • Making recycled paper creates 35 per cent less water pollution than starting from scratch
  • Making recycled paper our only paper would theoretically decrease paper production air pollution by 74 per cent
  • The cost of machinery to start a recycled paper business ranges from thirty to sixty thousand dollars, which stays relatively affordable in comparison to any other general production startup costs.

I don’t know about you, but I’m reading more pros than cons.

Basically, there’s a huge untapped market that we could dig into, to reduce the amount of trees cut down for paper products, as well as reuse secondary raw materials in a way that would reduce the overall size of landfills. Obviously it’s not that black-and-white, but maybe this is a small way to make a real difference?

 

Photo by Lou Neveux-Pardijon

Categories
News

“Don’t Buy That” gives used items a second life

With the average Quebecer spending approximately $458 over the holidays, as shown through a survey reported by Global News, you can count on people’s wallets being stressed.

Concordia University’s Centre for Creative Reuse (CUCCR) and the Art Hive hosted a workshop titled “Don’t buy that!” on Dec. 4. Teaming up with Sustainability Ambassadors, the workshop offered alternative gift-giving ideas by creating their own holiday presents and decorations.

Arrien Weeks, a coordinator for the CUCCR, explained that wrapping, purchasing and even making gifts can create lots of waste. “we just came together to try and change that,” Weeks said.

The event, hosted downtown at the Hive, included four different stations. Each was curated to a specific need: a card-making station, ornament crafting, knitting help, and their popular beeswax wraps workshop. It also included vegan baked goods made by Devonly Bakes, a student-run catering service.

Materials used at the workshop were all reused or recycled. “I’m hoping it can make people rethink how they approach gift making, gift-giving, and just trying to reduce people’s consumption at the end of the day,” Weeks said.

The Wednesday evening crowd consisted of a mix of Concordia students, alumni and other event-goers who had never even been to the campus before. Abigail Lalonde, an avid knitter who volunteered for the event said, “The skills that we share with each other are useful. It supports a really good state of mind, which is self-sufficiency. I hope that people can come and learn something. That they can feel included. That they can share with someone.”

Kate Evoy, a student at Concordia, brought her friend Lexi Benware along to the event. The pair was eager to try different arts and crafts. When asked about the workshops’ value, Evoy said “Obviously the sustainability is a huge part of it. Mixed with a community atmosphere, I think that’s such a good way to introduce people to sustainability and the effects of consumerism and all that.”

Events like this one help build a culture around sustainability efforts,” said Benware. “It’s not just one person doing it – people are coming together and making it more normal and natural for people to do.”

The two friends believe that presenting alternatives to the materialistic holiday we all love can educate people on the negative effects of consumerism. Evoy said instead of the typical dooms-day rhetoric she’s used to, she was warmly welcomed.

“It’s more like, come to partake in this, and it’s fun, and we’re doing good things,” she said.

Ivan Chamberland, a Concordia alumna, was inspired by the ingenuity of beeswax wraps. In today’s throw-away society, Chamberland finds herself excited to learn new ways of consuming alternatives to disposable items.

 

Photo by Laurence B.D.

 

Categories
News

CUCCR opens a brand-new space after seven months

“It’s really wonderful to be back and have our doors open, see a bunch of familiar faces, and a bunch of new people discovering CUCCR”

Concordia University’s Centre for Creative Reuse reopened last week in a new location after seven months of renovations. The new centre is located in the Grey Nuns Residence, and the bigger space allows for more room for CUCCR to grow.

CUCCR is an organization that takes material – like school binders and fabrics – that would usually be thrown out by Concordia, and offers it for free to Concordia students and anyone that is a member of the organization.

“It’s really wonderful to be back and have our doors open, see a bunch of familiar faces, and a bunch of new people discovering CUCCR,” said Anna Timm-Bottos, the creator of the organization. “People really were waiting very patiently, and we felt so bad not being open because we know this is such a valuable resource.”

The new space in Grey Nuns, open Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, mainly focuses on being a place where people can create things. It currently has sewing machines, cutting and book binding stations, and Timm-Bottos plans to expand this in the future.

She explained that in May, CUCCR’s original space in the basement of the Hall Building closed to allow for renovations in the new space. She had planned to open in September, but because of strict security at the Grey Nuns Residence – as it has to be secure for students – there were delays.

With a new and bigger space, Timm-Bottos is excited to see an influx of people, but because they reopened in a quiet time of the year – with exams and holidays – it’s hard to say how popular the new space will be.

Yet, the traffic is still increasingly higher than what it was last year. Timm-Bottos explains that according to their records from last year, around this time of year they would have 20 to 30 people a day, and in the busy times of the year, 70 people a day.

According to Timm-Bottos, with the new space, they are having around 50 to 60 people a day, and in the first week since reopening, they had over 250 visitors.

One of the plans for 2020 is to have a tool library, where people pay either a monthly, yearly, or by-the-semester membership fee, to rent out simple tools like power drills and wrenches, to take home. Timm-Bottos explained that she wants people to have more tool literacy, so that people understand how and when to use them.

She started off as a high school art teacher, where she witnessed teachers being afraid of lacking the budget to buy art supplies and being forced to use their own money to buy them. When she came to Concordia to do her Masters, she saw the same fears in the teachers she was training.

Two years ago, Timm-Bottos got involved with Concordia’s sustainability community, and realized the huge amount of material that an institution like Concordia throws out. The project she then proposed was originally waste diversion, but now it has become a complex organization with around 3,000 members.

There was just a missing link, which was CUCCR.

“There was a lot of fear of what it could look like,” said Timm-Bottos. “But what we found is we have diverted over 19 tons of material in the two years we were open. Concordia discards over 60 tons a year, so we are barely scratching the surface, but at least it’s something.”

Timm-Bottos hopes the new CUCCR will be more active in making things, rather then the Basement Shed, which refers to the old space in the Hall Building and was seen as more of a free store.

The Basement Shed is currently open Tuesdays and Fridays as a material depot. In January, it will focus more on being a space where people can make things with reused material.

“It still functions that way, but hopefully there are more opportunities [with the new space] for skill shares, workshops, more educational opportunities, where people can learn some skills,” said Timm-Bottos.

 

Photo by Maya Jain

Categories
Student Life

How to become actively involved in the zero-waste movement

Graphic by Florence Yee

Quebec actress Mélissa de La Fontaine talked about her experience joining the movement

Quebec actress and environmental health advocate Mélissa de La Fontaine talked food waste and consumption during her Conférence Zéro Déchet on March 21 at Université de Montréal.

During the conference, which was held in French, de La Fontaine touched on her experiences living a zero-waste lifestyle and offered tips for people interested in joining the movement.
She talked about her experience moving from Shawinigan to Montreal, and how she started raising her awareness on environmental issues and the rising problem of food and material waste in Canada. She said through her activism, she wants to encourage all Montrealers to make better environmental decisions.
“You should all know that the garbage that we throw daily, it does not disappear. It ends up at landfill sites,” de La Fontaine said. According to de La Fontaine’s research, there are two ways these sites pollute our environment—many non-compostable materials, such as plastic produces methane and well-water. “Methane ends up in the air that we breathe, while well-water is a form of juice that garbage creates, which can end up in our oceans and deeply harm fish,” she said.

De La Fontaine propelled herself in the movement after reading environmental activist Bea Johnson’s book Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying your Life by Reducing your Waste. The book helped de La Fontaine become more educated on waste and environmental issues in Canada. The environmental advocate said she believes if everyone made small, regular contributions towards waste reduction in their own homes, it would do a lot of good for the planet. According to a 2016 Huffington Post article “Let’s Work Towards A Zero-Waste Future By Creating A Culture Of Reuse,” people throw out “an average of 4.7 trash bags of clothing every year,” which is equal to 2.6 billion pounds of garbage that goes into landfills per year.

“We do not need to count every piece of garbage we throw out, but rather all contribute according to our personal limits. We all have limits, so it’s not about going to extremes,” de La Fontaine said. She said following a minimalist lifestyle is a good way to reduce waste. When you live a minimalist lifestyle, you are dedicated to buying less and focusing on only necessities.

She outlined a four-step technique to limiting waste in urban households. The steps are refusing, reducing, reusing and recycling.

Refusing is about saying “no” to extra, unnecessary items. This includes trinkets organizations tend to give away at conferences. It also includes promotional cards and flyers distributed on the street, or “freebies,” as de La Fontaine called them. “You are telling the organizations to make more of these items, which causes an issue when they use petrol and energy to create them,” she said.

Reducing is about minimizing the purchase or use of household products, among others. Reducing not only saves money but also lowers the demand for certain products that harm the environment, but that also create pollution when they are manufactured.

Reusing is about utilizing items such as bags and containers. De La Fontaine suggested to buy reusable plastic containers and grocery bags that can last for many years and do not cause damage to our planet.

While de La Fontaine said recycling seems fairly self-explanatory, it’s important to do it correctly. Composting is one of the most important waste-reducing processes, she said. About 50 to 60 per cent of garbage being thrown out in Quebec is compostable, according to Statistics Canada.

“I would recommend composting things like fruit peels, which is very easy to do,” de La Fontaine said.

De La Fontaine said she hopes in the next five years, Canadians will start taking serious action towards environmental health, reducing waste and saving the environment from further pollution.

For those interested in finding out more about the zero-waste movement in North America, de La Fontaine highly recommends reading Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying your Life by Reducing your Waste.

Categories
Opinions

It’s simple: know what to put in the trash

Montreal ad at Concordia tells people to throw out recyclable and compostable things

If you hop on the metro after spending time at your downtown classes—which most of us do—you must have seen the huge ad about not littering done by the city of Montreal. It’s designed to be seen as you head underground from the Hall building.

If you haven’t, here’s a quick description: a hand is dropping a handful of garbage into the trash, with the snappy slogan of, “it’s simple! Clean up the environment.” So far so good. There’s only one problem: in that little handful of trash there is 90 per cent recyclable paper and an orange peel.

Not a huge deal, right? Wrong. There is a huge deal here. Recyclable paper should only ever end up in the blue bins for recycling. Orange peels, and all other food waste for the record, should be composted and not tossed in the nearest trashcan. Recyclable paper and biowaste does not belong in the garbage.

Of course, the city meant well by creating this ad. Montreal is encouraging everyone to pick up after themselves, and not just leave wrappers, cigarette butts and dog droppings in the gutter (which Montrealers are pretty guilty of doing on a daily basis). But paper and an orange peel in the ad is just sloppy.

This weekend, thousands of people took to the streets of Montreal to bring attention to global warming. Another 100,000 marched the streets of New York. At this point in history, we should be far past asking people not to litter.Trash is no longer garbage, but a combination of recyclable, reusable and reducible items.

Nine boroughs offer composting pickup programs on the island according to the city’s website. Considering how many areas are trying to promote compost collection, that orange peel should not be present.

In terms of garbage disposal, Concordia is quite advanced. Composting and recycling bins are found in almost every building on both campuses. And yet, this humongous ad is impossible to miss, and located on a path no student can skip.

Why isn’t the city stepping up its game with this ad campaign? By not including recycling and composting in this ad, Montreal is showing a concerning lack of attention towards these important aspects of waste management and indicating an absence of commitment to dealing with sustainability on a municipal level.

Concordia, a beacon of sustainability in this city, should be more wary with what ads it posts on and around campus.

The city should work to promote composting and recycling in the city, and offer better services in these departments. If not, they should at least take the time to remove bio waste from their litter campaign.

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