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Hopeful Story, November 18, 2018

  As a church, we don’t often consider our impact on the environment as we have a small staff and usually don’t create much more garbage than a typical household. However, the church’s Property Committee has been looking at this recently as the number of rentals in the building has steadily increased. 
  It all started when we received a visit from the Region of Durham as an inspector had noticed the 20 - 30 garbage bags that we had put out following one of our dance recital rentals. Although they were all being picked up each week, we learned that, as a church, we are only entitled to 4 garbage bags every 2 weeks – the same as a typical household.  With over 15 dance recitals in a year, including 1-2 per week in June, we realized that we would need to take some drastic action to have just 4 bags!
  After some further discussion with the Region, we confirmed that we can put out unlimited recycling and compostables each week which prompted us to take a closer look at what was going into all those black bags. A quick target was the large amount of paper towel waste from our washrooms which is now separated out from the regular garbage by our custodians, Ron and Linda. With just this change, we’ve been able to divert many bags from landfill.
  Next up, we’re looking to put as much compostable material in green bins as possible. That includes coffee grinds from Sunday mornings as well as paper plates from church BBQs and spaghetti suppers. We hope that you’ll help us with this change, as you are hopefully already doing at home, when you start seeing these bins in the kitchen.
  Lastly, we’ve noticed that separating out these different types of waste would be much easier through the use of separate bins for garbage, recycling and compost. We’re working on getting some 4-section waste bins in the near future that will clearly label where everything needs to go and we hope that you, and our various rental groups, will join us in getting back down to just 4 bags of garbage every 2 weeks.
- Chris

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