The grand opening of the facility, complete with a “throwing of the on switch” by the Mayor, was a big press-attended event, and a great celebration of Calgary finally getting a real recycling program!

But… I wanted to see beyond that sanitized version of the MRF, clean and dressed up for all those guys in suits; I wanted to see and tour the MRF in full operation. I wanted to really get a sense of what is happening to all the “stuff” that we are now dumping into our Blue Boxes.

And, man, is there ever a lot of stuff that we are recycling! To see the MRF in full swing, sorting and recycling 40 tonnes an hour, 5-tonne truckload after 5-tonne truckload of recyclables being delivered, is an impressive sight. The sound and fury of environmental responsibility in action!

The “machine” that sorts the recyclables into its various components: cardboard, paper, plastic film, plastic bags, plastic containers, glass; fills the better part of the huge building! You climb up ladders to get above the various material streams and look down between the criss-crossing catwalks and conveyor belts whizzing in all directions, at all speeds. It can be quite disorienting, even giving you a touch of vertigo!

What is all the more amazing is that the people working in tandem on the line, sorting the material, checking to make sure that nothing gets past that shouldn’t, are doing this at the most amazing speeds. The eye-hand coordination to do this is incredible. Yes, a lot of it is done by machine, but there are human eyes and hands along the entire line. 80 people currently work in the MRF and there are plans to expand that up to 100 jobs.

At the end of it all, after the mounds and mounds of unsorted-recyclables are first unloaded and pushed onto the initial conveyor belt; after all the various materials are sorted whisked off on their own way, eventually ending up in bales of like materials; after what I am sure are miles traveled on conveyor belts throughout the “machine”; at the very end, falling from a hopper, is a fine drizzle of detritus that cannot be recycled, that is destined for the landfill.

Forty tons an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week: that’s 1600 tons of stuff a week that isn’t going to the landfill. And we still have one quadrant of the City to be brought on-stream! Just wait until we get even better at recycling! Wait until we are all on-board and figure out all the stuff that can be recycled from our homes!

It is an amazing start to the Blue Box program! We should all be proud of what we have accomplished and what we can accomplish in the future.

For photos of the MRF, check out the Gallery page.

The report, entitled Recommendations for City-Wide Commercial/Retail Policy, was a 400 page document with many recommendations pertaining to the retail/commercial equation in the City’s overall plan for growth.

One of many recommendations the consultant made in the report was to pursue a dispersed model of ethnic retail development rather than a concentrated model. While this opinion could be argued, it is not racist. There were two lines within the report surrounding this recommendation that were poorly phrased, referring to ethnicity, and while the offensive phrasing has been expunged from the report, it is my feeling that Mr. Leung, the report’s author, did not intend disparaging remarks against his own ethnic heritage, nor against the City where he was born and raised.

It is also important to understand why the recommendations were not accepted by the City, and are not, and never were, part of the Plan It Calgary proposals and recommendations. The City has no legislative capacity to determine the nature of the retail that is developed on a site beyond permissible uses according to the land-use bylaw, nor does the City have any desire to manage retail at this level.

Multiculturalism is a key component and foundation of our City, not to mention our country. Diversity is something that benefits all of us; we are each enhanced by our exposure to other cultures and lifestyles. We should never do anything to limit that nor to cloister it.

We must not lose sight of the incredible importance of Plan It Calgary. We must not let a misplaced furor over recommendations that were never even considered be allowed to sidetrack or hijack what has been a robust and engaged process. Our future, our sustainability, our quality of life, depends far too much on our building a city which will be livable and viable for our children and their children when they grow up.

For as long as I have lived in Calgary the Cecil has had a ‘bad’ reputation. Yet a 1914 edition of “the Albertan” describes the Cecil as “a cosy resort permeated with fellowship.”

How did a place so described evolve into the place we came to know it as? A place that generated 1700 Police and EMS calls per year (4-5 calls per day, every day of the year!)

I wanted a chance to see the inside of the Cecil before it came down. I wanted to see if there were any remnants of the cozy resort, any evidence of the fellowship that described the hotel’s beginnings.

It was quite something to see the state the hotel had fallen into. It was an eye opening experience to see the conditions in which some Calgarians lived, for some, many years had been lived in the hotel. The rooms are meager and spare, the shared washroom facilities are basic, to say the least. In a word, the experience was heart-wrenching.

There were some fun little discoveries, like old skates hanging in the basement and the old furniture scattered throughout the hotel. There was the faintest of echoes that reminded me of its roots as one of those old style rural hotels; with the bar on the ground-floor and the rooms above. I have posted some pictures on this website for people to have a look, check out our gallery page.

The Cecil is a great part of our history as a city; it was one of the original old hotels in Calgary. And, to be blunt about it, little, if any, of that history has survived. With the exception of the handful of stories that those who lived or stayed there over the years, we, sadly, lost the historic Cecil Hotel many years ago