CAW blowing it over a wind turbine

My family has a history with the CAW dating back generations. My wife was also once a card carrying member of the union and in 2005 we attended a family education session at the CAW Family Education Centre in Port Elgin, Ontario.

To say we believe in much of what the union stands for would be fair. It's done a lot of good for a lot of people throughout the years.

But what we saw from the CAW in Port Elgin last week gave us pause for thought. Erected in the parking lot of the CAW centre was a giant, green wind turbine. It's not that wind turbines are unheard of in Port Elgin, they're not. In fact they're scattered all over farmers' fields throughout Saugeen Shores. The winds coming off Lake Huron make it an ideal area for wind generated power.

Given the CAW's environmental policies a wind turbine fits in with the union's beliefs. However, their own wind turbine has one fatal flaw -- it's located in a highly populated neighbourhood, the closest house being 150 metres from the turbine and the CAW centre itself even closer. Even the Province's own safety conditions as set out under the Green Energy Act state turbines should be a minimum distance of 550 metres from the closest house. Why is the CAW turbine not set back further, you might be asking yourselves? Approval for this project came before the Green Energy rules were enacted.

Saugeen council has enacted its own bylaw measuring the minimum distance between homes and wind turbines at 2,500 metres citing health concerns. The CAW maintains its own studies indicate no harm can come from a wind turbine but there are countless other studies that contradict that claim. CAW President Ken Lewenza though has gone on record saying the union has spent too much money now to turn back. The wind turbine cost about $2 million and Lewenza said stopping the project mid-way would be like halting the build of a multi-million dollar house. The difference though is a house isn't required to be 550 metres from other homes and most, if not all, don't pose potential health and safety risks to its neighbours.

I believe there are cleaner ways to produce energy other than using coal fired plants and nuclear reactors. Wind turbines and solar power are good alternatives. Everything has its place though and if the residents, council, MPP and MP asked me to reconsider erecting a wind turbine or a bank of solar panels on my property I'd find another way to accomplish my energy savings. It's easier to work with your community than to spurn it.

The CAW has a social conscience and has always attempted to better the world around it. But not in this case. It's turned its back on its neighbours all for the benefit of powering its own facilities. Seems pretty selfish to me and I believe it's a decision that will come back to haunt the CAW.

What's so big about Big Blue?

Big Blue is here or so read the pamphlet that came with my new recycling bin.

The Regional Municipality of Durham's Works Department has been dropping off these giant blue bins for the past two weeks. They're being distributed to approximately 184,000 households across Durham Region.

For those who know me it's no secret I'm a fan of recycling. My garage is full of blue boxes and a green bin, my backyard sports two composters. So when I heard residents were getting these Big Blue bins I thought the recycling program was expanding. According to the pamphlet that came with Big Blue that's not the case.

Rather than expand the program to include more items such as clam shells and take out containers, these newer, larger recycling boxes are simply to put your plastic containers and bottles into, items we currently put into 'Little Blue'. Paper and cardboard products will continue to be put into the same blue boxes they've always been put in.

So what's so big about Big Blue? As far as I can tell nothing. We're just being asked to put our bottles and plastic containers into it. Now, half the blue boxes I've purchased on my own will more than likely go unused.

Am I the only one who really doesn't need Big Blue? Maybe. By looking around my neighbourhood  enough of my neighbours already have plenty of little blue boxes to accommodate their bottles and plastics. Big Blue to most of us is just a big waste of money.

That said, I will use Big Blue. I've never met a recycling container I didn't like. I just question the necessity for it now. These containers should have been around 15 or 20 years ago when recycling programs started.

Winds of change for Ontario

Of all the methods of producing electricity the most common in Ontario are nuclear and coal. Both methods keep our lights on but they share one negative -- pollution.

Coal fired plants are dirty and spew toxins into the atmosphere. Nuclear reactors leave behind radioactive material that has to be stored for hundreds of years.

Another method of producing electricity that I didn't give much attention until August was wind turbines. The technology has become very popular and is said to become even more widely used in the next few years. The upside is that wind turbines produce zero pollution.

I think wind turbines are cool. They're big, white, powerful and tower over everything around them. The one at the CNE I often watch as I'm stuck in traffic on Lakeshore Boulevard.

In August I took the family to beautiful Bruce County to a cottage in Port Elgin. The countryside up there was beautiful, farmland everywhere resting on the shores of Lake Huron. This wasn't the first time we'd been to Port Elgin, we'd traveled there before five years ago. What caught me off guard on this most recent trip though was the number of wind turbines that dotted the landscape. Driving between Port Elgin and Kincardine there were wind turbines as far as the eye could see. For someone like me, a creature of the Greater Toronto Area, the sight of so many of those structures was a sight to behold.

I Facebooked about it and got a reply from a former colleague of mine, Dwight Irwin, who now resides in Ripley (near Kincardine) that wind turbines weren't all they're cracked up to be. There's a lot of opposition to them up there. Noise and vibrations were the most common complaints. They do make some noise I will admit as I stopped at the Bruce Power Information Centre where there were quite a few of those wind turbines set up. But given the majority of the wind turbines were located out in the middle of huge swaths of farmland, kilometres away from any residential areas I found it hard to believe noise could be that big a problem.

The Province of Ontario is on track to quadruple wind capacity by 2015 according to a story in the Toronto Star (http://www.thestar.com/business/article/866129). It's going to cost as much as $14 billion according to the Ontario Power Authority. That's a lot of coin but with Premier Dalton McGuinty vowing to take coal fired plants offline he's got to come up with an alternative fast. And given the new nuclear build at Darlington is on hold right now until the sale of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited -- a federal Crown corporation -- is taken care of wind turbine generation seems to be the direction the government is blowing. Even if AECL wasn't for sale it would still take 10 years to build the new nukes so something needs to fill the electricity void being left by coal plants going offline.

When it comes to electricity there's really no technology that's going to please everyone. We all want the lights to go on when we hit the switch. Nuclear doesn't seem to be going anywhere soon so replacing coal with wind seems like a good idea to me.

Burned out over electricity costs





A couple of years ago I wrote a column about my frustration with energy efficient light bulbs. In a nutshell I said they were a sham and light bulb manufacturers were making a killing off of suckers like me who thought they were doing good by the environment.
Consider this the sequel to that column.





Those twisty light bulbs were touted as being able to last for years as opposed to the old fashioned light bulbs that lasted a few months at best. I'm looking at a box of the twisty little deceivers right now and it says in bold type 'Lasts 7 years GUARANTEED'. That's funny because I installed the light bulbs that came from this box just last summer and guess what? Three of the five burned out this week.

On the other side the box of those energy saving mini twister lights is an Energy Star symbol proclaiming the bulbs will save me $376 in energy costs over the 7 years they're in use. It should have read 'íf the lights last that long'.

It's also difficult to appreciate a $376 savings when Premier Dalton McGuinty has guaranteed  all Ontario taxpayers will pay more in electricity costs when he takes all our coal burning plants offline, has every household outfitted with smart meters (peak period billing means more money for hydro, less money for you) and let's not forget the HST that we now get to enjoy on top of the 'debt repayment charge' on every electricity bill.

I'm feeling about as burned out now about electricity costs as these useless twisty bulbs.





One big plastic mess

The other day I saw a picture of hundreds of plastic bottles and other plastic scraps floating in the ocean. It was a mass of crap discarded by people no different than you and me.

It got me thinking, why do we use so much plastic?

When I was a kid one of my first jobs was as a bottle boy at Becker's Milk. My main responsibility was to take returned pop bottles (or soda bottles if you prefer) and carry them downstairs putting them in their appropriate crates. Coke products went in the red crates, Pepsi products the yellow crates, Canada Dry in wooden crates and all Becker's Cola bottles in green crates (I can't believe I still remember this!). There were also smaller crates for the 10 ounce bottles that used to be popular with kids. Once a week the Coke rep would pull up in his truck, take all the sorted red crates and drop off crates with full bottles. Ditto for the Pepsi and Canada Dry representatives.

It was an efficient and environmentally responsible system, one which the Beer Store still uses today. Unfortunately the Beer Store is one of the last companies still doing right by the environment. Cola companies today use plastic for practically everything. Glass bottles have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Somewhere along the line somebody figured out that more money could be made by using plastic, not glass. The compromise? Recycling programs such as the blue box. Today the Region of Durham is inundated with pop bottles, yogurt containers, milk containers and the like. One of the most common things found in blue boxes around my neighbourhood is water bottles. Guess who sells most of these? You guessed it, cola companies.

Now if every plastic bottle used made it to the blue box there wouldn't be a problem. But that's not the case. Take a walk anywhere and you're bound to find plastic bottles of all shapes and sizes littering roadways, ditches or schoolyards.

Let's also not forget the plastics that the blue box program doesn't accept. Buy a cooked chicken from the deli counter at any grocery store and the plastic container it's in has to be discarded in the trash. You can't even recycle the paper Tim Hortons coffee cups because apparently they have a microscopic plastic layer in them.

Earlier this summer an outside company inspected Durham Region's trash to see if residents were throwing away the right stuff. Since the green bin program went into effect a few years ago the Region's been monitoring what we throw out to make sure the majority of us are recycling responsibly. The company reported in an Oshawa This Week story (http://www.newsdurhamregion.com/article/156855) that they were shocked by the amount of plastic in our trash. This plastic wasn't the type residents are able to recycle.

Plastic is everywhere and unfortunately it doesn't biodegrade. It's no wonder we find it littering the oceans, our neigbhourhoods and schoolyards.

When I first saw that picture of a big mass of plastic bobbing in the ocean I was surprised. I shouldn't have been. We put it there.