Gordon Sinclair Jr. demonstrates the power of the press to increase ticket prices for entertainment events that will take place in the near future.
I love this story because everything about human nature comes shining right through.
The management at the MTS Center is keenly aware that their clientelle are believers in recyckling. After all, the indoctrination process has been going on since the 70's. MTS Management put out "blue boxes" to give the appearance of recycling to the public. In reality, the blue boxed recycling materials went out with the garbage.
Gord is taking the Management to task.
The bottom line is that MTS Center awarded the garbage contract to a company that handles garbage but does not recycle.
MTS Management made the case that they do not have the money to employ people to sort through the recylables in any event.
Needless to say there will be enormus pressure for MTS management to comply with political correctness.
The money will have to come from somewhere.
I guarentee you the money will not come from any "excessive profits" the MTS Center makes.
The money will come from the prices people pay for event tickets.
This is just a little "mini senerio" that demonstrates the power of politcal correctness. I bet this kind of thing goes on everywhere. People pretending to be enviromentalists because they know better than to speak-up about the waste of time and money: they just garbage it all and hope no one notices.
Who can blame MTS Center management for wanting the "appearance" of being politically correct recyclers? Some rat-fink indoctrinated person brought the case to light and now MTS Center management have egg on their faces.
It is very expensive to recycle. Story was the City was mulching the recylables with the ordinary garbage a couple of years ago because there was simply no market for the items. Or it cost $100 for feul to deliver recylables to the factory and recieve a $50 payment for the material.
None of that will matter because "the people" are firmly convinced that recycling is "worth it."
Well, it's not worth it when you cause more pollution recycling than what the recycling actually saved.
None of that matters. The environmentalists are voting to spend your money, not theirs, so, there is no amount of money that will be deemed too expensive.
That goes double when the supporters are of the mind that recycling expenses can be taken from "excessive profits." Excessive profits being anything left over after taxes have been paid!
Most of us don't think twice about throwing certain items into the blue bins at home. There's no cost to us.
The MTS Centre should recycle and I won't mind paying pennies extra on a ticket for the added cost. Tickets should not go up very much, spread over the hundreds of thousands of people who attend shows each year.
Recylcing has become part of the "waste management system" for a lot of years now - are people still balking about having to do it or the cost ?
Yeah it costs but it's become a fairly normal part of the routine. Not so long ago we could dump all of our raw sewage straight into the river and today 're also a lot more concious about keeping toxic waste and dangerous goods out of the landfill. Recycling is just another part of it.
If you really wanted to strip away the costs close down the sewage treatment plants, stop andy restrictions at the dump and we could have a free for all !
[quote] Some rat-fink indoctrinated person brought the case to light and now MTS Center management have egg on their faces.[/quote]
Why do you always take environmental issues negatively? Maybe this is someone who was genuinely concerned by the MTS Centre's apparent lack of regard for the environment?
Think about that before you imply that they are "indoctrinated" and calling them a "rat fink".
[quote][cite] Tigerman:[/cite]MTS Management made the case that they do not have the money to employ people to sort through the recylables in any event. [/quote]
Oh boo hoo! Since when did recycling and cleaning up after yourself become such a chore?
Oh, but I suppose we should just bury the garbage and wonder why our water is polluted. How last century.
[quote][cite] zander:[/cite][quote] Some rat-fink indoctrinated person brought the case to light and now MTS Center management have egg on their faces.[/quote]
Why do you always take environmental issues negatively? Maybe this is someone who was genuinely concerned by the MTS Centre's apparent lack of regard for the environment?
Think about that before you imply that they are "indoctrinated" and calling them a "rat fink".[/quote]
Actually, I think there's a huge inconsistency in Tman's argument.
What's the alternative to recycling? Throwing it away, burying or burning it. Guess who pays for that, and who manages that? The government.
Whereas recycling is an individual choice to reduce garbage.
[quote][cite] alex:[/cite][quote][cite] Tigerman:[/cite]MTS Management made the case that they do not have the money to employ people to sort through the recylables in any event. [/quote]
Oh boo hoo! Since when did recycling and cleaning up after yourself become such a chore?
Oh, but I suppose we should just bury the garbage and wonder why our water is polluted. How last century.[/quote]
It's a cost of doing business. I'm sure they'd prefer not to have to pay someone to do a lot of things around the centre but theyswallow it and do it.
[quote][cite] mrchristian:[/cite]It's a cost of doing business. I'm sure they'd prefer not to have to pay someone to do a lot of things around the centre but they swallow it and do it.[/quote]
Will they cry about having to wash their windows too? I'd like to know how other arenas and stadiums handle their garbage.
I think that the issue that Sinclair brought up was that the MTS Center was attempting to fool people into believing that they were recycling, when in fact, they are not.
[quote][cite] Jimmytufish:[/cite]I think that the issue that Sinclair brought up was that the MTS Center was attempting to fool people into believing that they were recycling, when in fact, they are not.[/quote]
That's exactly the point here. It's one of the rare times I agreed with Sinclar's column.
In PEI, you can't throw away anything. It's an island with limited space for garbage and too small of a budget to send the garbage elsewhere. They have quite the brilliant recycling system.
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all: it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." -H. L. Mencken
Today must be Menken day since I found three quotes I think make the case.
Public schools is where all the greening of the kids went on. That is political indoctrination passed off as education.
If recycling made sense, we would be paid to do it.
"Enviromentalist," well there are two kinds of those. Those who value the human environment and those who value nature's intrinsic state. To those in camp two, everything man does is evil.
Geroge Reisman makes the case.
Standards of Environmental Good and Evil: Why Environmentalism Is Misanthropic by George Reisman
Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he's discovered contradicts almost everything we're told.
When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.
The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 lbs. a day. In fact, we create less than 3 lbs. each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or American 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 lbs. of coal ash each American home used to generate, and our modern packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.
But most landfills will be full in ten years or less, we're told, and that's true. But most landfills are designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we're not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.
The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common to all left-wing movements. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.
In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 lbs. of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1 % was disposable diapers. All plastics totalled less than 5%. The real culprit is paper – especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.
Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn't biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn't introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.
We're told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn't so. In surveys, 78% of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26% said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do – they don't separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26% actually separated their trash. The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don't is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.
We're all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.
If it is economically efficient to recycle – and we can't know that so long as government is involved – trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.
The cave men had garbage problems, and so will our progeny, probably for as long as human civilization exists. But government is no answer. A socialized garbage system works no better than the Bulgarian economy. Only the free market will solve the garbage problem, and that means abolishing not only socialism, but the somewhat more efficient municipal fascist systems where one politically favored contractor gets the job.
The answer is to privatize and deregulate everything, from trash pickup to landfills. That way, everyone pays an appropriate part of the costs. Some types of trash would be taken away for a fee, others would be picked up free, and still others might command a price. Recycling would be based on economic calculation, not bureaucratic fiat.
The choice is always the same: put consumers in charge through private property and a free price system, or create a fiasco through government. Under the right kind of system, even I might start separating my trash.
end Lew Rockwell.
Well Lew Rockwell makes more sense to me than anybody else I ever heard speak on the issue.
I think that is a great defense for why I don't want to pay any extra at arena events or anywhere else.
During a recent trip to the Winnipeg recycling facility I was informed that it when you take into consideration revenues generated from the sales of diverted materials it was much cheaper to recycle a tonne of material than to landfill it.
The problem with your anti-enviro argument is that there are now almost 7 billion people on this earth. Without turning this into a debate on morality, you can't live like your actions have no effect on anyone else. It's called COMMON PROPERTY.
Don't kid yourself, there has never been and never will be a perfect marketplace. One of the roles of government is to establish markets for current market externalities (ie.pollution) so better estimations of cost can be used in decision making.
This is essentially what is happening when you pay 3 cents more for your plastic jug of milk. So if you won't recycle for the environment, think of recycling as helping an emerging marketplace mature.
[quote][cite] alex:[/cite]You're trying to make this too extreme Chris.
It's not political correctness. It's not the government who is pushing us to do this (they aren't) or some evil self-serving environmentalists.
It's a fact that garbage and waste is an issue. What's the alternative?[/quote]
The fact is that garbage has been an issue since time began and will be one until time ends.
MTS Center management seemed to have it all under control. They contracted out to a private outfit and away went the trash.
You can bet the trash collector separates anything worth a buck to him, like metal, into a recyclable pile.
Sound like Kevin Donnaley already pulled out a slide rule and calculated that recycling would not be worth the cost or he would have done so without needing a prod from Gord Sinclair.
So what's wrong with letting the Contractor take the garbage away and dealing with it as he see's fit? The Contractor likely had to bid on the job and his slide rule calculations took into consideration what could be recycled from the center and what would be buried or burned.
The economics are simple. Every dollar a ticket goes up means there are fewer people who can afford the price. People only have so many entertainment dollars and there are plenty of competetiors looking to make that dollar.
What if some events are rescheduled to the Convention Center and who knows what their recycling policy will be there? MTS Center does not know what costs other venues have in having their trash hauled. Wehn they look to attract events, they must do so by offering to hold the show at the least cost with the most return for everybody involved.
So MTS Center must seek the lowest cost removal of their trash in order to compete with all other venues offering the same services.
Does it cost more to clean up MTS Center or the Convention Center after an event?