In this week’s NOW, Mike Smith writes about last weekend’s TTC camp in Camp-out with TTC geeks. If you missed Matt Blackett’s report on the event, you can read it here. Here’s a bit of Smith’s take on the day’s activities:
If organizers’ obvious passion for the cause holds, similar endeavours could help communities expand as well. This group is mostly educated, white downtowners; if we start dealing with how to make the system accessible to the suburbs, to newcomers, to people without laptops, then the democratic promise of the city could be kept.
Spacing’s subway buttons also get a mention:
… the subway station buttons speak less to our affection for, say, Victoria Park, than to our love for the city — a revelling in the points of intersection between self and others, in the public intimacy of ridership, in the intersection of individual motion and the city’s currents.
If we celebrate the stops, it’s because they represent milestones on the map though they rush past the window, like the lovers who pass through our lives.
Also in NOW, Adria Vasil writes about how it’s high time Toronto bans the use of styrofoam in Foam here to eternity. Toronto intends to start recycling styrofoam by 2008, but many are saying this isn’t good enough.
“There’s really no viable recycling solution to styrofoam. You can’t take a styrofoam container and maike it into another styrofoam container,” says [Farrah] Khan [founder of NaturoPack, a newby not-for-profit promoting the use of enviromentaly friendly packaging.]
That means your foam coffee cup might be “downcycled” into insulation fibre, CD cases or those disposable plastic trays for bedding plants, but every takeout container you get is still made with virgin polystyrene plastic. And that’s a seriously polluting endeavour.
While the City of Toronto makes deadlines to recycle styrofoam, many American cities are talking about banning takeout uses of it, Vasil writes. The article includes a side bar of where to get “green takeout” in the city. For a complete list, visit the website Green Shift.
photo from NOW, by Alex Felipe
4 comments
I find it curious that Matthew’s account of the afternoon describes a varried demographic yet the Now one says “a downtown white crowd” even though every picture I’ve seen of the event has a non-white person in it, including Now’s own photo!
It’s stuff like this that has had me not trusting Now Magazine for the last few years — everything seems to go through some angry-masturbatory-class-conciousness-manifesto meat grinder. For frigg’s sake, just write about things as they are and work out your Leftie historonics before you start writing, on what I can only assume is working-class non-laptop typewriter. I wish their editors would let Now writers just write, and not make them describe the world they way they saw it in 1982 when they were 26 and mad-as-hell or whatever they were then. It’s as dishonest, to me, as the National post and Terence Corcoran is on the other side.
I like the sound of banning expanded polystyrene take-out containers, since that invokes the first and best “R”, but I wonder what the better alternative is.
Is there a better plastic? Is growing corn for corn-based foam less pollutey? Does anyone seriously recycle greasy, sauce-and-cheese-encrusted aluminium foil? Are people really going to tote around their own Tupperware and Thermos kits just in case they end up needing a doggie bag?
The isolated fact that polystyrene foam containers are “downcycled” (?) into CD cases doesn’t strike me as particularly terrible — it’s not as though there’s no demand for CD cases, after all. And when the polystyrene can’t be reused or recycled any more, you can recover a little of its energy in a modern garbage incinerator (it’s probably cleaner to burn than the coal that’s a fifth of our generating capacity).
Dog Bone-
Hi.
The event – which was a really wonderful day – was indeed predominantly pale-skinned and middle class.
Toronto is not.
This is an issue.
It’s an issue because, arguably, the majority of the people being effected by shaky transit service are members of poor and racialized communities.
No blame was laid. No “histrionics,” as you say. It was just a simple fact, mentioned simply in passing as something that should simply be noted. I’m surprised you latched on to it.
Despite this new golden age of feel-good urbanism, class and race haven’t gone away. Sorry.
Corn as takeout containers? Do we want to drive up the price of Mexican tortillas more than the ethanol manufacturers already have done?