While I was out knocking on doors I spoke with Chad Hooper. He reached out to me by email later the same day to further discuss an issue that is important to both of us.
To: John French
From: Chad Hooper
Date: Sat, Oct. 7, 2018
Subject: Elections Questions
Hi John,
We spoke briefly today. I checked back on my notes from the all-candidates meeting and realized I had a couple of questions for you. You mentioned at the first meeting that you wanted to promote recycling, and hit people who dump garbage hard. I was wondering if you could elaborate on these points, or any other you’d like to discuss given your short timeline to talk at the meeting?
Thank you for dropping by today.
Cheers,
Chad Hooper
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To: Chad Hooper
From: John French
Date: Sat, Oct. 7, 2018
Subject: Elections Questions
Thanks for the note Chad and thanks for the opportunity to address this.
I like the work Carneys did to get us to where we are with the recycling and compost programs we have. The recovery rates are still lower than they should be. I support rewarding the behaviour we want to promote and punishing the behaviour we're trying to move away from. There is significant evidence out there suggesting we should compost all of our kitchen waste, yard waste and other organic waste materials. These materials should be easy to dispose of. We need to explore how to make those who put compostable materials and recyclables into the landfill pay for that choice. One way to do this is to make 'garbage' pickup a paid additional service based on weight or volume. I want to look at having the residential garbage totes move to an extra service requiring payment. This will force people to think twice about which tote they put their waste into. Too many of my friends do little to no source-sorting and simply choose to put everything into the garbage tote. Those people should pay.
Landfills are a stupid concept - plain and simple. We need them and sadly we'll continue to need them. We can do ourselves and our planet a favour while saving ourselves a significant amount of money by only using them for the waste that we can't deal with in some other way.
I trust this answers your question. Let me know if you have any follow up questions.
John French
Councillor candidate District of Squamish www.JohnFrench.ca 604 815 7318 mobile Twitter @johnsqfrench
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To: John French
From: Chad Hooper
Date: Sat, Oct. 7, 2018
Subject: Elections Questions
Further to this, I think we need to spend more marketing $$ explaining to people what and how we can recycle. I’m a staunch recycler, and even I get confused at what goes where. We should also make it easier for people (people are lazy) to recycle by offering curb-side pick ups for all recycling. I like your idea of charging for landfill items.
Chad
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To: Chad Hooper
From: John French
Date: Sat, Oct. 7, 2018
Subject: Elections Questions
We can certainly look at spending more money on marketing. There are other ways to reach the goal of increasing diversion rates and I want to explore those. One place to start is to check with other communities with high diversion rates to determine how those places achieved their successes.
John
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