A rose by any other name ....
Just when you think that you have started to experience “it all”, you get thrown a curve that is so beyond incredulous and potentially damaging for our efforts that you start to laugh in spite of yourself.
Under the column of “what were they thinking?” as well as the column “who lobbied whom?”, we have unexpectedly learned that we have lost the use the word of the term, “organic”, in Canada.
Super.
Some will fault us for not being aware of the initiative undertaken by the Canadian General Standards Board to establish a standard for those who decide to use “organic” as a claim for their product.
But in the column of “misery loves company”, I’m glad that our staff as well as the Council is joined with every provincial and territorial ministry of the environment as well as agricultural… heck --- every premier and his/her government, every municipality and every business enterprise who is building a new way-of-life and an organization to encourage the diversion of organics from landfill and their transformation into compost for added environmental and agronomic benefits.
If you bought into the thought that Canada was a democratic system and that there are processes in place to engage interest groups in public consultation efforts, etc., you would have believed that somewhere along the way, our Council or one of our many members or even the non-members of our Council but players in the organics recovery efforts would have been alerted to the fact that the word “organic” was in play and that we had better gear up to get our voice and position heard.
But no.
Our recent survey indicated that, through organics recovery and composting, we recover about 4 million tonnes of “waste” materials and transforming them into a value-added organic-based product – compost – instead of being buried in the landfills across Canada. Those 4 million tonnes of organic materials represent 12% of the overall Canadian waste stream.
12%. And now our education and communication messages as well as the labels and messages of all those involved in the organics recovery business will need to re-jig our efforts so that we eliminate the use of the word, “organic”.
Good stuff.
We get limited attention on any political front. We definitely don’t get adequate attention re: program priority.
And now we have lost our rallying cry.
We can’t use the word, organic, unless we apply for certification.
At the Council, we have tried to eliminate the word, “waste” when we speak about organics. As in … let’s not say “organic waste”, let’s use the phrase “organic resources” to denote the value associated with scooping those organics out of the waste bin and putting them in a compost bin, green bin, compostable or plastic or paper bag or whatever else container that will ensure their destination to a composting process.
We also speak sternly and react strongly when folks use the 4-letter word that ends with –uck … and starts with “y”. Not even the worst marketers of consumer products lead with negatives.
But all our re-orienting of the dictionaries and thesauruses in the world pale in comparison with the regulatory “acumen” that has been passed to restrict composting efforts in Canada from using the word, “organic”, in our messages and product descriptions.
Kind of makes me terribly glad that our members, our Council and our staff have taken the “easy” way to help build a new waste-resource mindset to build composting’s credibility and acceptance in Canada, take 12% of the landfill-destined “waste” stream and convert them in to value-added products of environmental and agronomic benefit.
And just when you wondered if there was still enough “fight” left amongst the “organics recovery warriors” ….