By Terri Chu Having a kid is expensive, anybody can tell you that. What nobody told me though was how expensive raising a child can be when you try to stay low on environmental impact. Cloth diapers are a huge capital outlay and I’m not convinced they are used long enough to break even against […]

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Plan to transform underutilized space By Annemarie Brissenden Bloor Street West is about to get a whole lot greener, and it’s all thanks to the trees. Currently confined to box planters, Bloor Street’s trees are suffering. The concrete boxes — sometimes known as tree coffins — prevent saplings from growing to maturity and obstruct pedestrians […]

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Relentless OMB stifles creative green projects By Terri Chu Every time someone mentions a great municipal infrastructure project on the other side of the pond (usually in a really progressive nation like Germany or Sweden), I mutter some lame excuse as to the reason why Canadians can’t have equally nice things. “Our population density is […]

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Time to break up with your large garbage bin By Mike Layton Despite a higher cost and growing list of recyclable and compostable items that you can put in the blue and green bins, some households are holding onto their super-sized garbage bins and continue to throw away stuff they could recycle, reuse, compost, and […]

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Make informed choices when buying green By Terri Chu One great thing about living in the Annex is that there are lots of places to buy green products. (Though losing Grassroots means there are not a lot of places to refill shampoo bottles.) I find myself taking this for granted and not always carefully reading […]

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Harbord Village plan targets laneways, parkettes By Marielle Torrefranca Harbord Village is aiming to get a whole lot greener. Joe Cressy (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina) and the Harbord Village Residents’ Association (HVRA), a community-led volunteer organization, have released a joint Green Master Plan, which outlines a series of actions to create urban green spaces in the […]

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Animating our local laneways By Joe Cressy Downtown communities like ours face unique challenges and countless opportunities. Almost every day, in conversations at our local coffee shops, in public meetings, and as we connect with our neighbours, we look for ways to work together to build our communities. We look for opportunities to enhance our […]

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The energy lost in the pretense of plastic recycling “Why can’t they take black plastic?” asked my partner, staring at the City of Toronto recycling poster. I didn’t have an answer. The ad, which helpfully reminds Torontonians what goes in which bin, notes that all black plastics are relegated to municipal solid waste. Turns out, […]

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By Beth Macdonell “I heard someone call this the Seinfeld election. The election about nothing,” says James Norrie, a social media researcher and associate dean at Ryerson University. “It seems pretty apathetic out there.” Still, Norrie believes in the power of social media. “If social media can provoke social unrest to the point that a government can fall,” […]

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