Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
Eight sea cans full of plastic bottles left over from Iqaluit’s water crisis last year will be sent for recycling to Montreal by the end of July. The water bottles were used in Nunavut’s capital last fall when fuel contamination in the municipal water supply prevented approximately 8,000 Iqalummiut from drinking tap water for two months.
Eight sea cans full of plastic water bottles are being sent from Iqaluit to Montreal for recycling at the end of July. Hundreds of thousands of bottles of water were flown into Iqaluit during the city's water crisis last fall. A fuel contamination in Iqaluit's water supply meant the city's approximately 8,000 residents were unable to drink the tap water for two months.
A week-long water crisis that has left residents of Nunavut's capital city Iqaluit without drinking water is also exposing a chronic problem for many northern communities: It's almost impossible to safely get rid of garbage. Close to 750,000 plastic water bottles have flooded the city in recent days after city staff last week found fuel in Iqaluit's water supply. While a coalition of businesses has since teamed up to ship the empty bottles back, most of the city's trash never returns south.
Canadians drink approximately 2.5 billion litres of bottled water a year, so that is a heck of a lot of plastic bottles. While Canadians, and especially here in B.C., are pretty good at recycling theses bottles there is still a huge impact on the environment. For starters, if you factor in making the plastic bottles the water comes in, it takes manufacturers up to three litres of water to product one litre of bottled water. Then you have the energy it takes to produce the bottles from the petroleum raw materials, clean them, label them, fill them, and package them. They then have to be transported to the stores, using more energy. Then they are picked up and transported to your home, and finally disposed of.
