Morning Brew: Martin Streek Commits Suicide, Ontario to Investigate Green Bins, Ubisoft Wins Big (but not according to McGuinty)
Photo: "Toronto the Dirty- Day 14 Park- not dump" by seastarerrin, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
Toronto radio icon Martin Streek, longtime Edge 102.1 announcer, is dead, having taken his own life yesterday. Toronto Mike had the scoop on Streek's farewell last night, quoting a Facebook status update that appears to have doubled as suicide note. Now, of course, there's also a Facebook memorial page. There won't be the same fight for access to a memorial service (or media giddiness for receiving that access), but Streek deserves a proper memorial (of course he also deserved better than being axed after a lifetime with CFNY).
The 18 year old convicted of manslaughter in the death of Manny Castillo - while playing rugby - is 12 months probation and a lot of community service. Castillo's father had no comment on the sentence but turned his ire toward the coaches who he says allow a style of play that allowed the death of his son. How many rugby or hockey players have to die - or get seriously hurt - before there's no tolerance for fighting, and coaching for the coaches?
A pair of young men are dead after apparently street racing last night on the DVP. The driver was pried from his crumpled Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo while his buddy was struggling to live on the side of the road; a female passenger ejected from the car suffered relatively minor injuries and is doing fine in hospital. Not the first time somebody felt the need or speed on the DVP but hopefully prosecution has increased.
Ontario is concerned that Toronto's Green Bin program is nothing but a sham and will be doing a province-wide probe into compost programs. A Star investigation found that the city inflates the diverted waste percentage - claiming a third of our garbage is turned into compost - and that too much salt in the compost may be deadly to plants. Of course, as long as this strike continues and we're supposed to put green bin waste in the garbage, nothing is being diverted from the garbage stream.
McGuinty says he won't choose winners and losers but video game company Ubisoft was the big winner of $263 million to build a Toronto studio to produce, publish and distribute video games. Does that mean fans of the Splinter Cell or Prince of Persia video games can say they're buying local?
Brian Burke is remaking the Leafs with hard workers. Yesterday he signed Francois Beauchemin, shoring up a weak defence, with $3.8 million per year deal. Burke knows Beauchemin from their days on the Ducks and is signing players who play tough. And he's apparently pleased with a newly discovered mean streak in top draft pick Nazim Kadri. The new-look Leafs should be interesting on the ice next year as Burke's stamp will be all over the team by this fall.
Comments (37)
How does the 'edge' get rid of Martin and Barry Taylor but keep the three idiots in the morning? The 'edge' brings shame to radio.
How many rugby or hockey players have to die - or get seriously hurt - before there's no tolerance for fighting, and coaching for the coaches?
Have you ever played rugby or hockey??
Subsidizing business still seems like a bad idea. That is a lot of taxpayer money to create 800 jobs. Video game industry jobs are also overrated (speaking form experience) every wants to do them so kids take low wages to have a cool job. (sort of like the ad industry where the title art director sounds cool, but the wages are low low and the turn around is faster than mcdonalds).
Re: Toronto's Green bin issues. The Star article indicates problems with the amount of plastic. When I first got the my bin I would use some newspaper to line the bin, a few months ago the city stopped collecting the bin and when I asked why I was told to use a plastic liner as told on the City website:
http://www.toronto.ca/greenbin/faq.htm
Durham the "shining star" doesn't use plastic to line the bins:
I just don't get the logic from the city of Toronto sometimes.
The Spirit of Radio is truly dead now. Rest in Peace, Martin knowing how you made an impact on our lives.
At least they are subsidising jobs that Ontario can have a future in instead of the doomed automotive sector. An additional 800 jobs in that field can actually increase wages across the board when other companies are forced to increase their wages or lose programmers to other companies.
Sorry but that's not relevant. I hate to get all after-school-special on you but one death in a RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY is far too much.
I used to love tackle football (no gear, we were no team) but the risk of seriously and permenantly injuring another person is scary.
Its relevant because the killer also plays in the OHL.
There is a rule in Rugby that you can't tackle someone while their in the air, because they can easily flip or roll and land on their back or head and cause serious damage.
This fool picked someone up and deliberately dropped them on their head.
Depressing that the green bin program turns out to be more a "feel good" program than actually reducing landfill. Reminds me of those "100% biodegradable" PLA plastic cups that similarly make you feel good, but since they need special composting facilities to breakdown, they end up going to landfill with all the other plastic cups.
We need to start policing green claims and heavily fine companies that abuse our trust.
"Reminds me of those "100% biodegradable" PLA plastic cups that similarly make you feel good, but..."
Or those hybrid-car batteries that "can be recycled." Fine print: ship 'em to China and let THEM deal with the extremely nasty process.
Why doesn't Ontario investigate it's OWN useless "green" project: the LCBO's "recycling" of empty wine and liquor bottles?
It's a brilliant scam, really. Instead of just tossing these bottles into landfills, the LCBO decided that consumers would be charged deposit on them. This means revenue in the government's pocket for every bottle that consumers don't go to the extra effort to return.
Consumers who do return wine and liquor bottles must instead take them to the (brewery-owned and Ontario government-regulated) Beer Stores, meaning that (Ontario government-owned) LCBOs don't actually have to do any work.
But, unlike mostly standardized beer bottles, it's impossible to match up all the different wine and liquor bottles with the wineries and distilleries that issued them. So what happens to the wine and liquor bottles that Beer Stores take in? You guessed it - they're sent to landfills anyway.
And the big kicker is this: glass is non-polluting anyways. It's made from fused sand, remember?
radio in Toronto SUCKS.
but 102.1 was better than most.
But the recent staffing changes tells me that they don't want my business, nor anyone over 21.
It's ridiculous.
Martin, you will be missed. Thanks for helping define my musical tastes.
"Consumers who do return wine and liquor bottles must instead take them to the (brewery-owned and Ontario government-regulated) Beer Stores, meaning that (Ontario government-owned) LCBOs don't actually have to do any work."
I'm pretty sure that the LCBO asked several companies to bid on this and the Beer Store won. I'm also sure that there's money in it for them.
Can you support your other claims of bottles going into landfill at all? I'm pretty sure that glass (bottles) not reused get crushed and melted down and turned back into other glass things.
Glass wine bottles are recycled. It's not quite as nice as the process for beer bottles (which are washed, relabeled, and filled with new beer), since they are melted down rather than going back to specific wineries, but they are recycled. If you buy a glass bottle (any sort), it probably contains about 25% recycled glass (North American average, Europe is higher). Beer bottles which don't make it back to their original company meet the same fate.
"So what happens to the wine and liquor bottles that Beer Stores take in? You guessed it - they're sent to landfills anyway."
A ludicrous and baseless claim. The glass gets melted down and remade into new glass products, fool.
Okay, where to start. Well, to continue with what Recycling said, wine bottles get recycled, not reused. The problem normally with tossing a wine bottle into a blue bin is that the process of sorting, transporting and processing isn't exactly delicate. No glass bottles will make it to a recycling processing facility intact. When that happens it's pretty much impossible to separate the different colours. The greens, browns and clears all end up in one worthless pile. You can't take that hodgepodge and turn it back into wine bottles...or pretty much anything else useful. You'll probably never see this 'recycled' glass ever again; It'll probably end up in some industrial application. There's of course only so much demand for these industrial applications that can make use of the mixed glass (generally more than supply), so under the old system most of that glass you throw in your blue bin actually ends up in landfills.
Bringing it back to the Beer Store, with it's existing sorting facilities means the different glass colours can be separated and then turned back into actual glass bottles (well, a certain percentage). Traditionally the only 'recycled' glass that went back into wine bottles was scrap from the initial bottle production, or from other industrial glass production where the colour was consistant.
Secondly, glass is very polluting, but it's less the material and more the production. Lots of chemmicals are used, and LOTS of heat and energy. Recycling requires just slightly less energy and resources, but hey, it's better than nothing.
"ds," there's not really any profit in recycling glass, which is why the LCBO refused to do it when asked to by the Ontario government, who then mandated that the Beer Stores do it. And if it can't be sterilized and refilled, there's no real profit in it for the Beer Store either.
"Recycling", okay, I believe you that (some) glass bottles are sorted by colour, crushed, refined and melted down to make more glass bottles. But bottle manufacturers are not going to go to a lot of extra expense to create raw material, instead of just digging up some fresh sand.
So why divert these bottles from the Blue Box just to have them wind up in the same place?
Some background reading here:
Fast facts:
The value to bottle manufacturers of municipalities' Blue Box intake of bottles is $29-$36 per tonne if clear glass and $0 (yes, zero) if coloured glass.
Municipalities can turn a minor profit at this price. Diverting a tonne of glass bottles through the LCBO/Beer Store raises costs to an unprofitable level.
Municipalities still take in large amounts of non-LCBO food and beverage glass, meaning that they are now higher-efficiency lower-cost competitors to LCBO/Beer Store.
It all comes down to money. I see this all the time. Doesn't matter how good you are - it's what you cost the company. Companies don't care about the individuals or their families and how they are affected. They only want to make sure that the managers bonuses are maxed out. The little guy takes the hit to make that happen. I have listened to Martin since day 1 and loved his work and style. I find it interesting that the Edge tried to keep it quiet when he was let go so as not to alienate their long time listeners. I hope whoever made the choice to let him go will take pride as the stations ratings drop off the map. But that person probably won't care because they got their bonus. I've listened to the station since its days in Brampton. As of today it is off my presets.
Glass recycling is an oddball business. Oddball fact number one, even though all they do is grind the bottles up none of the glass processing companies will accept broken bottles for processing so anything that gets broken in handling between the Beer Store counter and the final processor winds up in landfill, good thing is that there is much, much less breakage in the current system than there was with blue boxes so yes, much less stuff is going to landfill.
Oddball fact number 2, Canada imports way more green glass wine bottles than we produce domestically so there is a surplus of green glass, we could theoretically re-export the green glass back to where it came from for reuse but that doesn't actually make much sense as it increases the net carbon footprint to an impractical/undesirable level so most green glass winds up in secondary uses.
Oddball fact #3 take a bunch of sorted wine bottles, grind them up and melt them and chances are the resulting glass is not good enough quality to make wine bottles with so the vast majority of new wine and booze bottles are made from virgin glass and most of what gets returned winds up in secondary uses.
What are these secondary uses I keep talking about? Well some of it gets used for abrasives (yes, that's right, sandpaper) but most of it is just chunked up and used as construction aggregate, that's right substitute gravel (now that's not such a bad thing, mining of natural aggregate is a serious environmental problem)
I expect Ontario to score higher, but the flowchart on this page indicates that of all North American post-consumer glass, only 25% is recycled, and more than a third of that is "downcycled" into other products (like construction aggregate, ceramic tiles, etc. as Chester Pape pointed out) from which it will likely never be recovered.
http://earth911.com/blog/2009/06/22/truth-about-glass-recycling/
Again, good thing glass is non-polluting (other than the environmental costs to manufacture AND recycle it, as Ryan L. pointed out).
Really? 8 of 27 comments are about glass bottles.
Recycling is more important to you than someone who just died.
Great city we got ourselves here.
oddball fact #4: Almost all glass is made from up to 50% recycled glass and AT LEAST 15%. This is because new glass is easier to make when at least some recycled glass is remelted into the mix (It helps speed the melting process). Even if recycled glass was priced higher than the raw silica used in new glass, recycled glass would still be used because of that fact.
So yes, recycled glass does indeed have value. The problem was the contamination that would occur at the consumer level. Contaminated glass is not valuable. The new system is designed to reduce that. I'm not sure where the problem is.
I mean, I keep seeing problems being listed, but most of these are things were problems with the OLD system that we're trying to correct.
Yes, we only recycle something like 25% of glass, but reducing contamination is only going to help bring that number higher.
That's probably because some people have posted multiple times about the glass issue and there really is no reason to post more than once about the death of Martin. Definitely not something people are going to debate over.
People die everyday, and his life and death was not socially significant to me.
Recycling affects my daily life.
What i find curious though is that the star mentions that he died, but failed to mention that it was suicide. Puts the the start and their incomplete reporting in a new light for me.
I might consider a similarly rash course of action if I was fired alongisde Barry, while Blundell was given a raise... (tongue firmly in cheek)
oh that's sad about Streek. I remember back in the 80's requesting song after song live when he was on the air. Sad too about Barry - what the hell is Corus (they still own them right?) doing?
Ok..
Martin was an icon to the GTA!!! if anything he dedicated his life to the Edge!!! I can understand why he did what he did... to some of you it's like losing your wife!!! to others it's like losing the band mate that you've had since you were lost in high school... but think about it people... some people commit to their jobs like some commit to their families or religion... Martin committed to the edge 150%... he will be greatly missed and very well remembered for years to come... It's not Ross's fault this happened... it's Martin's way of saying good bye to us all and to wish us a good journey for what ever direction we choose.. Martin left us and he will always be in our hearts for every Friday and Saturday we partied with him... Good luck on your next journey...
Good by our friend!!!
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