Re: 鈥淔or Greater Victoria, recycling can be a pain in the glass,鈥� Jan. 3.
It would be going backward to use plastic instead of glass containers. Glass containers are useful; I use some for freezing food, particularly the Adams Peanut Butter jars. When I have a surplus of those jars, I put a free ad on online classifieds, and they are snapped up that day.
There鈥檚 a simple solution. About 35 years ago, the Capital Regional District had the first hard-plastics collection day. It was in the Saanich police parking lot. Hundreds of people brought their saved plastic containers, and we loaded several shipping containers.
We had been saving them for other uses because we couldn鈥檛 see putting them in the landfill. They still had some use, or could be recycled later. It was an amazing day, and it would be wonderful to see some photos from that day.
The same could happen with glass 鈥� for those of us who have space, store until it is useful for recycling again. In the meantime, we can reuse it wherever possible for storage of dry goods, spices, etc. A refund system is a good idea, but glass is tricky to transport and a possible safety issue. Or perhaps the CRD program could just continue to collect glass, and store it locally until there is a need again.
An education program is needed if contamination is an issue.
I鈥檓 sure there is cross contamination in all items collected. It鈥檚 education that will reduce contamination.
L.M. McRae
Victoria
