• 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Avalon Dairy in BC uses glass bottles, and grocery stores which sell them take them (in exchange for your $1 deposit) and send the bottles straight back to Avalon. They get cleaned and reused directly. If you’re at the store, you can look closely at all the bottles and find the dates they were first used. Alas, I’ve kind of gone off getting them now that we’re using 2L bottles of milk every week - the bigger bottles are extra bulky and my nearest grocery store doesn’t sell Avalon.

    I’m still a big fan, though. It’s a good system, it genuinely causes the bottles to be reused (instead of just not made out of plastic, or “recycled”), and it’s so simple. We could easily have this for everything if we regulated (or at least incentivized) specific containers for groceries, at least for things packaged domestically. No more needlessly complicated special jars for different brands of maple syrup. If every company used the same containers, when they reach the recycling depot (hopefully intact, although that’s another problem) we could actually do something sensible with the things.


  • This project is frustrating :( I would happily use this train if it magically existed today, but to me it feels like it’s eating up all of the oxygen. The trains we have are fine. I wish they were faster. But the core problem is the existing rail network is neglected, antiquated garbage and there aren’t enough passenger trains because there’s only room for freight. It would be a lot of work to improve those tracks and add more trains, but something tells me it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, faster, and more effective over time than a one-off megaproject that will never scale and whose timeline is competing with plate techtonics themselves.




  • Honestly people don’t even need to get rid of their lawns most of the time. Just don’t mow it so short, or so often. Don’t obsess over it. Let it grow. Let its roots grow. Allow some native perennials to fill the space in between, pluck the ones you don’t like, and see what survives. Be patient. It won’t be in a constant state of shock and it’ll hold water much better. Chances are it will be greener - even in a drought (isn’t that the type of situation where we all benefit from green space that is actually alive?) - and might not need to be manually watered at all.


  • People love to bring up accessibility whenever cars vs. [any other form of transit] come up, because it’s a convincing argument on the same level as “somebody please think of the children.” Because of course the only way grannie can get to Third Beach is by car, straight from her doorstep to the bottom of the stairs. And the only way that can ever be possible is if we build a four lane road to handle them all, and add another acre of parking to fit all those extra cars that appeared for some reason. (See also: Granville Island).

    I’m being facetious, but it is a hilariously popular argument. There are very good reasons to have a functioning road there, but while we’re talking about accessibility, cramming bikes and pedestrians together on that section of the seawall is not it, and I’d argue it is a more serious accessibility issue than the road being congested. It was nice having that separation.

    And alas, those other trails through the park are lovely, but they aren’t very comfortable or efficient on a road bike.