STUFF

Comedian George Carlin once described a house as "a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff." Indeed, it seems like the only thing we spend more time doing than buying stuff is earning money to buy more stuff. All this shopping is connected to ecosystems across the world and here in Ottawa.

Where does it come from?

Where does it go?

What you can do!

Did you know?

• About half of our city's residential garbage is made up of packaging.

• Ottawa's rate of residential recycling is the lowest of any large city in Ontario, and less than half the rate of Markham.

• It costs Ottawa taxpayers $90/tonne to put waste in landfills, and $44/tonne to recycle it.

• In 2005, Ottawa residents threw out more than $1 million worth of recyclables, most of which was paper.

• Waste in Ottawa produced 257,669 tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution in 2004. That's more than 1/10th of the pollution produced by all the city's cars, trucks, and buses combined!