Postcard | Let’s talk waste

(Philadelphia) The city is green on this lovely March weekend. Green due to St. Patrick’s Day celebrations.

Guillaume Lefrancois
The Press

On Saturday evening, downtown bars were packed with young people dressed in green, who had come to celebrate the saint that Montrealers obviously associate with the Taverne Magnan. Sunday noon, the action moved to the streets, closed to the area around City Hall for the purposes of the parade.

In a 2015 poll released by the Pew Research Institute, 11% of Philadelphia residents identified as being of Irish descent.

The city was therefore green in the literal sense, but figuratively, it is something else. Like the rest of the country, the volume of waste is striking, and green initiatives are hard to find.

Our burst experiences since our arrival here:

• at lunch on Saturday, in a cozy downtown bakery, the soup that came with the sandwich was served in a cardboard bowl, with plastic utensils;
• at supper on Saturday, the menus were on paper, and the glasses of water were served in plastic cups (in defense of the innkeeper, a St. Patrick’s Day Saturday is risky for the glassware);
• at lunch on Sunday, the order before us was spectacular: “smoothies” to go, in plastic cups, each wrapped in layers of cellulose hydrate (we learn new words every day!) very thick, all delivered in a plastic bag.

That said, this type of phenomenon is obviously not unique to Philadelphia. At lunch in Albany on Saturday morning, the dishes and cutlery were disposable. Which caused a problem when the waffle maker refused to cooperate. After two minutes of effort, we ended up taking off the said waffle from the cooker, at the cost of the tines of the fork, which melted. At least it earned us the respect of the lunch attendant, ready to present us with the Bill-Masterton trophy for the effort.

But the prize for unnecessary waste goes to the restaurant on Friday evening, in North Hudson, in the middle of the Adirondacks, where our pizza was served to us… in a cardboard box, as if to take away!

The waste problem is global in the United States, and plastic poses a particular problem. A report submitted last year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine calculated that the average American generates 300 pounds of plastic waste per year, an average higher than “all member countries of the European Union », underlined The Guardian.

The worst part of all this is that in Philadelphia, single-use plastic bags have been theoretically banned since last October. But in December, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported a PennEnvironment study showing that half of merchants ignored the ban. Our “smoothie” counter was obviously one of them.

Note, however, that we found in this restaurant one of the very few recycling bins we saw in town.

That said, nothing beats source reduction, but we don’t seem to be there yet…