Toronto Holds Back on Coffee Cups

What’s up, Toronto? It seems like it’s nothing but compromises up there in The Icy North. Just the other day, you guys voted to push back the ban on disposable plastic bags by four whole months, and now I hear that your committees are losing ground on the paper coffee cup debate as well? Unanimously, no less!

After a day-long debate yesterday, where business big and small turned out en masse to oppose the slate of measures, the public works committee voted to sit down with Tim Horton’s and other coffee chains to find a way to recycle single-use cups.

But other contentious proposals – to require a 10-cent discount for reusable bags at retail and grocery stores and bar the sale of bottled water on city property – were approved for a final vetting at the next council meeting.

Councillor Mark Grimes (Etobicoke Lakeshore) broke what threatened to be a stalemate at the six-member public works committee by shelving the coffee cup proposals until April but propelling the other measures forward to council.

“I don’t think we have this right yet,” Mr. Grimes said.

Apparently not. Thankfully, this decision was not taken lightly — it’s reported that the room was packed for the committee meeting and many showed genuine concern for what comes next, as well as frustration that (besides the obvious pushing back of an ultimatum) no one has really offered up any useful alternatives.

Councillor Shelley Carroll (Don Valley East) agreed to the compromise reluctantly, expressing frustration that business didn’t come up with any meaningful suggestions of their own during a year-long consultation on slashing packaging.
“The problem is the task group didn’t do it. That didn’t get people to the table,” she said. “I do subscribe to the theory of ‘I think we got your attention now.’ ”

It has to be tough, taking on so many causes at once. It probably wouldn’t be out of line to think that people are getting overwhelmed by the amount of change that environmental activists want to bring forward as soon as possible. Accusations are flying, such as that enacting a ban on paper cups is “taking the easy way out,” and while that seems mind-boggling at first glance (what is easy about enacting a ban on anything?), one has to ask oneself if it’s really worth it to try and ban paper cups — which are obviously easier to recycle than the infamous plastic bags — when a ban on bags themselves is already flagging? How do we do our planet justice while still garnering the support of the industries that make it go round? How do we pick our battles? It’s something to think about.

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.