Canada Coffee Cup Clash: The city of Toronto and the restaurant chain Tim Hortons have been at odds over the recyclability of the company´s coffee cups, and now a Montreal-area man has launched an online petition to push the company to offer ceramic mugs to all in-store coffee drinkers.

 

The city of Toronto says Tim Hortons´ coffee cups are difficult to recycle unless the consumer separates the plastic lid from the paper cup -- and even when consumers do separate the cups and lids, the cups have a plastic lining, which complicates the recycling process.

 

Tim Hortons says balderdash, the cups and lids are both perfectly recycable, and it doesn´t plan to change anything.

 

The city of Toronto has given the restaurant chain and other hot-drink sellers until the end of the year to either come up with a paper lid for their cups or to switch to Styrofoam. If they don´t, the city says it will ban all disposable paper cups with plastic lids.

 

The TV Tsunami, Not: The government-mandated switchover from analog to digital TV takes place next month -- in 40 days and 12 hours, according to this informational site that includes a countdown to the Big Day.

 

There has been a lot of debate about whether this change will result in a tidal wave of TVs being disposed of, or a trickle, or something in between. I´m in the trickle faction.

 

I gather there are still a lot of of the old rabbit-ear and roof-antenna TVs in use (I know only a handful of people who have them, but evidently there are still millions out there). Still, it seems likely that a large percentage of the people who have the old analog sets will buy digital converter boxes, while many of the others will stow their old TVs away for a while, and take them to a recycler eventually.

 

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste & Recycling News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

Copyright 2009 by Crain Communications Inc. All rights reserved.

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