Hi folks. Well, the holidays are over and January is traditionally the clean up and get organized month, right? So, we vacuum up all the needles from the real tree or put away the artificial one. We put the house back in ‘pre-festivities’ order, and yes, many of us will probably step on that bathroom scale to see the new number!

January is also about new beginnings. We’re hopeful whenever we start something new. Even our Town follows that tradition with the development of its new Strategic Plan. But as you know, it’s not just for a year. It’s for the whole term of this council. So it’s pretty important.

Of course, we at Sustainable Cobourg believe we can do more to bring an understanding of what it means to be a ‘sustainable community’ to this new council. It’s not that there haven’t been strides made in that direction in the past. Because there have been. And that’s what’s so encouraging.

In 2010, Cobourg was recognized with two awards from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities; one for changing the streetlights and one for water conservation. And recently, just last year, Diana Storen, made a presentation to us here at S.C., and to the Town’s Environmental Advisory Committee, to propose a way to recycle used coffee and tea pods from single serve machines, as well as to collect discarded cigarette butts.  Her initiative and her determination to find a better way to deal with waste were instrumental in the Town’s development of a six-month pilot project that will see the collection of these at the Cobourg Community Centre and the Downtown Business Improvement Area. Way to go!

What’s also interesting is that ‘What’s In Store’ has also had a pod drop-off container for some time now.

If we continue to make what we do with ‘waste’ a focus in our Town, we are definitely contributing to the ‘rethinking’ that is needed to move away from filling landfills and thinking about incinerators. Landfills and incinerators, no matter how high tech, are not sustainable solutions to waste management.

Reduce, reuse, recycle and rethink!

Best,

G. Ludorf-Weaver
President, Sustainable Cobourg

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
Time to RETHINK!