theaterculture's Profile

If one thing is $5, and another thing is $10, the less expensive one is 50% the price of the more expensive one. But if you phrase it the other way around, the more expensive one is 100% more than the less expensive one. Just sayin'.

I'm a Torontonian as well, and before my fellow Hogtowners get too self-satisfied you should know that 1) the city doesn't release numbers, but a friend who works as a municipal engineer figures probably 30-40% by weight of what gets put into recycling ends up going to landfill after being quite expensively sorted, which is at least in part because the city charges more for a larger garbage can but will give you the largest recycling bin with no extra charge, so people end up putting anything that seems "plausibly recyclable" (has ANY glass, plastic, or even wood content, as though somebody's really going to pulp your busted Ikea chair and make paper out of it...) into the blue bins; and 2) the first 100 or so tonnes of compost the city's green bin program created was toxic to plants because of excess sodium and also had to be sent to landfill.

The city of Toronto chooses to take a virtually "anything goes" approach to composting and recycling (although they do have big lists of things that should go in both bins on their website) because they figure it'll increase participation, but there are big processing costs and sometimes serious consequences to not asking people to sort more on their own.

People who are making the point that municipal recycling and composting programs aren't an invitation to continue wholesale thoughtless consumption and feel less guilty about it have it spot on...

The only types of glass that are recyclable are jars and bottles. All other household forms, including glass flower vases, drinking glasses, glass plates, pyrex, and window glass, are chemically hardened when they're made and have substantially higher melting temperatures than bottle glass. In the recycling process these harder glasses don't melt completely and cause structural imperfections in the resulting glass that is produced.

The guidelines for your municipal recycling program undoubtedly tell you this, though they may not tell you why.

Sorry, but as the original person to mention that maybe the "grad school digs" idea was a little disingenuously applied here, neither I nor any of the subsequent grad students and former grad students were trying to guilt the guy at all.

It's a problem when media conflate MBA students taking a break from lucrative careers to make their career prospects even more lucrative and the few students whose families can completely support them in high style with the vast majority of grad-students, who are usually folks who are genuinely scratching to live on less than what a lot of people have as a car payment in order to pursue a career they're truly passionate about. Some of us do make an effort to live as richly as we can, but as someone who has negotiated hard-fought collective bargaining agreements for unionized grad-student teachers and tas, we have to fight really hard against a public perception that we'd all be fine if we just stopped spending 20 bucks a day at Starbucks and made our own coffee in our bo-bo palaces, so it was the editorial tone of the piece with which I had (I thought a very mild and politely stated) an issue.