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My plans for today fell through, so I ended up going to the Edmonton Waste Management Centre open house instead.  I am mildly embarrassed at how much fun I had.  Seriously, at some points I was squealing and giggling louder than the kids on the tour.

We pulled up in the free shuttle bus that left from Stadium station to the open house tents in front of the Administration building:

Then we got tour tickets and hopped onto the schoolbus to tour the waste management centre.  Which started with one of the areas where they deal with commercial waste:

(Note: when you hear people talking about how awesome Edmonton is in terms of waste diversion, they are talking about residential waste.  Unfortunately, commercial waste is still generally just being landfilled.)

Then we got to see the tiny pile of residential waste that they had essentially just been pushing around all day for the purpose of the open house; normally on a Saturday that area would be empty.  I for one appreciated the effort.

(THE CRAW!)

Then we went through the compost area, where they sort all the diverted organic waste and add things like sawdust and newsprint and biosolids from Gold Bar to get the carbon:nitrogen ratios right – it was pitch black in that building so I only managed a couple of blurry photos of looming piles.  Then, we went to the MRF, Materials Recovery Facility, where they separate recyclables.

This was my (and the squealing kids’) favourite part of the EWMC.  I realize the photo doesn’t do it justice, wish I’d thought to take a video, but the people who are doing the sorting are moving at kind of a fantastic clip.  I don’t know why I assumed that all of the sorting was done mechanically.  (Racked with guilt, I have now resolved to follow all the recycling guidelines printed on the handouts they gave us.  Remove lids!  Rinse containers!  Flatten boxes!)

Here is where they bale stuff before sending it to market.  Why do I love things that compact things?

We drove past their stormwater management pond a couple of times.  It’s quite nice; and with my practiced eye I was gratified to note both their monitoring setup and their leachate management facility later.

I didn’t get any pictures of the GEEP building, which is where they process electronic waste (and have a very creepy computer graveyard – like, a hectare of staring monitors and tumbled towers) but I did get one of the still-under-construction paper recycling dome.  Seriously, they’re going to have a facility just for recycling shredded paper into asphalt roof shingles!  A smaller dome being inflated nearby is for recycling glass into glass building bricks.

Apparently they inflate the dome, then sort of spray concrete inside it to make it into a permanent building.  I totally and non-secretly want to live in a house like that.

After we went past the generators (which use landfill gas to create electricity that’s fed back into the grid) we went back to the administration building and I had some Funky Pickle pizza and read about composting.  They had a cute vermicomposter set up in the tent and the girl there was telling me how perfect it was for apartments because it’s odorless; I would give that some serious consideration, actually, because whatever I couldn’t use for my own plants I could just offload on the parental units.

Then as I was waiting for the shuttle bus two very little Chinese kids (maybe three and five years old?) who spoke German to each other and English to me came over to ask me to play, and we ended up running around a bit and I taught them how to make grass whistles.  (Which isn’t related to waste management but I thought it was a very odd thing to happen.  Their parents explained that they were staying here for a year because the dad has a contract with the provincial government and that they’re always surprised when random people ignore their children’s requests to play.  Don’t they have stranger danger in Europe?)

Anyway.  A fun and educational day, and I think well-salvaged from my original plan of staying in the house to sulk!

(I tried to post something light the other day but the video wasn’t embedding so I said a bad word and gave up. Now you get something HEAVY.)

The US healthcare reform is heavy on people’s minds this week, and I thought it might be interesting to compare theirs and ours, as kids are wont to do while playing doctor.

This is a reply, kind of, to the Musings of a Distractible Mind’s very, very interesting two-part series on What if Life Were Like Healthcare (pre-reform). He writes from the perspective of an American doctor, so he is both a healthcare producer and consumer. I unfortunately can only speak from the consumer side, and my version will be nowhere near as accurate or witty, but I thought it would be a fun thought experiment.

Please read the original first! There are, of course, a lot of similarities between any Western healthcare system, so he’s really done a lot of the work for me. I’ll just focus on the differences as I perceive them in the systems. Some of the similarities are:

- How easily we are all swayed by experts as well as charlatans, family, friends, and majority opinion on a subject we’re reasonably familiar with: the bodies we’ve had all our lives
- How people so readily accept health care ‘anecdata’
- How many hoops healthcare providers have to jump through in order to complete the paperwork necessary to be reimbursed by insurance companies, private clients, or the province/state
- How many tests are probably unnecessary but done because they are recommended by specialists who get reimbursed more for these tests
- How resistant all hospitals and other healthcare facilities are to publishing the costs of their care
- How the perception is that people who get free healthcare abuse the system by going to a doctor or the ER much more often than everybody else
- The system focuses more on cures than prevention
- People are ejected from hospitals generally far faster than is healthy for them, and they are not always provided with help when they are back home because they make too much money to be helped by the province/state and their insurance will not cover the level of care they need

“The grocer can’t post prices because all customers have different negotiated prices.”
Fortunately this is (as far as I know) not the case in Canada. Here in our grocery stores, there are even fewer brands to choose from – and fewer items on the shelves, due to our lower and often very dispersed population – but within a province, the groceries all cost roughly the same. You do not, of course, know what the cost is till you get to the till.

“You go to the cash register to pay. The total is $380, but the cashier informs you that your negotiated price is only $150. A poor person behind you has not had the chance to negotiate a price and so must pay full price for everything.”
This is partly true in Canada. I will pay $150 for my basket, while the guy behind me may pay $450, but after my employer pays me back for my groceries it might have turned out that I paid $100 of my own money and he paid $35. However, the poor woman behind me doesn’t pay full price – she will have her groceries paid for by the government, so she doesn’t even bring money to the store, just her shopper’s club card. She has to buy a lot of groceries because she has seven children, and the poor-quality goods on the shelves don’t feed them for long, so they always need more groceries. The other shoppers resent her for never having to pay anything and mutter constantly about her wasting the family’s food instead of saving it for when they really need it.

“Finally driving to work, you notice the following:
· Rich people have very nice cars.
· Poor people all have cars. They are not real nice, but all gas and maintenance is free.
· Many middle class people don’t have cars; those who do have to pay enormous amounts for ones that are worse than the poor people get.
· The elderly get free cars, but can’t afford to put gas in them.”

In Canada, we all take the bus. It’s secretly acknowledged that rich people get the nice new buses, or if they take buses with regular joes they always get the good seats by the door, but we all have bus passes and the government pays for the transit system. There are limo services too, which can sometimes be seen from the windows of our public buses, but they aren’t advertised as limos because if they say they will drive you along the same routes as the public buses, they will get in trouble with the government. They have to take you to very specific tourist spots, nowhere else. Despite their limited route and the fact that you pay for them yourself, many people use limos to get to these spots because the government buses don’t go there. Cars are supposedly not permitted, but you often see sports stars, politicians, or celebrities zipping along the back alleys in very nice cars. Sometimes the cars are even partially paid for by the government.

The busdrivers, though paid by the government, often think about leaving and starting their own limousine company, especially after they or their loved ones have to take the bus in a blizzard or on really hot days. A lot of kids graduating from busdriver academies are opting to become limo drivers because the pay is better and they get less flak from the riders. This makes the older busdrivers unhappy, because they are retiring in droves and with fewer buses, each one is getting more and more crowded and making fewer and fewer stops. If a bus doesn’t stop where you need it to, you are forced to get off one stop early and walk, even if you are in poor health or have limited mobility. Ironically, while you are walking you may be heckled by the other riders for needing to do this. They are proud of themselves for usually getting off at stops in good neighbourhoods where they don’t have to walk. Stops are eliminated every year, but the limos will take you to some of these stops if you can afford it. Most of them are too inaccessible to reach on foot.

Most of us hate it on the bus, but we either don’t need to get places that the limos go or we can’t afford to hire a limo. We wish we could buy cars, but the government won’t let us and insists we should all be happy that they are providing these buses, even though they are smelly, old, take forever to get anywhere, and are becoming increasingly crowded and objectionable. Worse yet, some of us are pretty sure that there are people riding the bus to places they could easily walk, but we don’t want to say anything because everything is supposed to be equal on the bus.

Anyway, there’s my Canadian take on things. Which probably was a dumb thing to do since I think 99.999% of SodaCraze readers are Canucks. Did I leave anything out? Was I totally off base? Let me know in the comments!

I sat down in the train last Friday and found a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ wedged between the wall and the seat, spine-up. It looked so new I immediately thought, “Oh dang, some English 101 kid is going to be really ticked off when he gets to University station and realizes he left his book here.”

I pulled it out and was extremely surprised to find that it wasn’t a first-year text at all, but a free-range banned book!

There was a sticker on the front that informed me (and yes, I wanted to photograph this instead of transcribing it, but I haven’t seen my camera in weeks):

FREE A CHALLENGED BOOK!

Did you know that someone in Canada is trying to stop you from reading certain books?
Are you shocked?

The book you are holding in your hands has faced a challenge or ban.

It has been freed by a citizen concerned about freedom of expression who would love to know your thoughts.

PLEASE RELEASE ME

We invite you to visit www.freedomtoread.ca to learn more about censorship.

Then there were some instructions on how to report the book on the Bookcrossing site.

And I was like, How great is this? So I hit up the Freedom to Read site as per instructions and was extremely surprised to find that right here in Canada, libraries are banning books that – in my humble opinion, which apparently counts for very little in the world of censorship – are about as innocuous as fat-free yogurt. (To see what I mean, look at the banned book list (pdf). I know, right?)

I am anti-censorship. I would be anti-censorship even if I hadn’t been writing what would have surely been banned books at a stupidly young age. I would be anti-censorship even if my shelves weren’t full of miraculous and controversial Soviet literature. (The Russians, they know censorship. We have no idea in comparison.) I am of the opinion that if it’s written, it was written to be read. (Whether it should be included in public curriculum or not is a subject for endless debate, of course, given my general thoughts on the public school system. But you know how it is. A kid that wants to read will read, and he will find and read banned books regardless of the venue.)

And I think kids need to be exposed to banned books – anything and everything, controversial histories of false events, all the old propaganda, the racist names and idiotic stereotypes, all that. Kids need to be challenged so that they can join the discussion and the debate. Why did people think that this was OK? Why do we no longer think that? What are some ways that we can show that this is wrong, or hurtful, or hateful, or scary, or true? What are some ways we can stand up against this? These are questions kids can’t ask if they’re being fed a steady diet of inoffensive literary pablum.

So I will come clean now and admit that I have never read ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ nor do I know why it was once on a banned or challenged list. I look forward to finding out before I release this book back into the wild.

Readers, thoughts on censorship? Hate speech? Which banned books have you read and loved and/or hated?