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Like most eco-conscious Vancouver residents, Ann Gibbon reduces, reuses and recycles.
She totes her groceries in cloth bags, sorts out her recycling and gets electronic bank statements to cut down on paper waste. In short, she thought she was pretty green.
Then the Vancouver municipal workers' strike started this week, and garbage collection stopped. And Ms. Gibbon's family, like many others, got a little greener. "We didn't like the idea of stinky old garbage piling up in our garage. We really thought, 'We have to do something about this.' "
So her family bought a backyard composter, into which they toss their yard waste and kitchen scraps. She estimates that they've decreased their garbage by about 75 per cent.
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"And the important thing is, the really gross stuff is down dramatically," Ms. Gibbon says.
"It's totally easy and really wonderful. I feel liberated."
Though the summertime garbage strike may be a neat freak's nightmare, it could become an environmentalist's dream.
Amid warnings that the labour standoff could stretch on for weeks, Vancouver residents are rinsing their jars and tins extra-carefully to keep bad smells and bugs away from their recycling, trying to reduce their waste and running out to buy backyard composters.
Out of enlightened self-interest, city officials are encouraging residents to step up their recycling efforts and consider composting, and they seem to be heeding the call. A survey of Canadian Tire, Rona and Home Depot stores in Vancouver this week found that most were sold out of composters, while a few had just one left in stock.
The run on composters reverses the trend of the past decade. Last year, 30 per cent of people in British Columbia used a backyard composter, according to Statistics Canada - ahead of the national average of 27 per cent, but down from the 38 per cent figure the province achieved in 1994.
Researchers attributed the decrease to more people moving into apartments and condominiums in Vancouver, where the composting rate is about 24 per cent.
"I think people will get more into composting" as a result of the strike, says Susan Antler, executive director of the Composting Council of Canada. While she wants the strike to be short and sweet for Vancouverites' sake, she hopes it will get them thinking harder about their trash.
About half of household garbage is organic material that could be composted, Ms. Antler says. You can put lawn and food waste except for meat, bones and dairy products into a backyard composter, about the size of a garbage bin. The organic material decomposes and transforms (shrinking in size) into humus, a rich soil component prized by gardeners.
The best part is that composting is one small way to move off the power grid, Ms. Antler says.
"You can control your own agenda versus being dependent on others," she says. "You can basically become virtually independent."
Raqib Burke hopes the strike will serve as a wake-up call. He lives in a co-housing complex in North Vancouver and produces no garbage - he either recycles it, composts it or doesn't buy it in the first place. The strike doesn't affect him at all, except, of course, for the smell that's starting to permeate the city.
"Our entire lifestyle needs to be sustainable, and creating garbage is a very unsustainable part of an unsustainable lifestyle," Mr. Burke says. "We ought to be looking at ourselves in the mirror."
Together with the roughly 35 other residents of his complex, Mr. Burke returns meat and fish bones to the butcher to be recycled. (Companies collect the waste from butchers to make bone meal and blood meal for gardening and agriculture.)
Using the deposit money from their beer, wine and juice bottles, they pay to ship their Styrofoam waste to a specialized recycling plant.
Not everyone will go to such lengths, but Mr. Burke hopes the garbage strike will inspire people to take simpler steps, whether it's backyard composting or just rinsing out their recyclables more carefully.
So far, no savvy environmental groups have jumped on the strike as a marketing opportunity for recycling and composting. But families such as the Gibbons have already gotten the message on their own.
"I'm really buying into this composting," Ms. Gibbon says. "We're not going to stop it after the strike is over. It does make you conscious of how much waste you produce."
