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Caribou Recovery and Recycling: Canadians Can Make the Link It may be hard to imagine, but whether you live in the country or the city, you have the power to help conserve caribou habitat in even the most remote reaches of Canada’s boreal forest. There are over 2.4 million caribou in Canada, but many subspecies, including several woodland caribou populations, are in trouble because of predation, habitat loss and alteration. Individual caribou can tolerate people, sometimes even following hikers through the forest, but large-scale human presence in the wilderness, such as roads at high densities, tend to have a negative impact on caribou herds. While habitat loss is the primary concern, some studies suggest that large industrial footprints caused by such operations as well sites, seismic lines, timber harvesting and access roads, fragment habitats and could also potentially reduce existing ranges by causing caribou to abandon their migratory traditions. The work of Simon Dyer, a caribou biologist in Alberta, has indicated that caribou avoid these operations, which may act as barriers to their movements. “But by using wood and paper products that are certified as originating from sustainably managed forests, consumers can contribute to caribou conservation,” says Dyer. Industrial footprints can be minimized if a company voluntarily decides to work with independent third parties that develop sustainable forest management standards. Three such certification standards are in use in Canada today: those applied by the Canadian Standards Association, the Forest Stewardship Council, and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. All have criteria to ensure that wildlife habitats are considered as part of the forest management process. This might result in making narrower roads, selecting different equipment for selective logging, using a range of harvest methods,, or encouraging multiple tenure holders on public land to share the same transportation routes. But the fate of the caribou is not just dependent on the level of industrial activity in the boreal forest. Consumers with an environmental conscience can help too. Even those who live in the urban jungle can help conserve caribou habitat by using recycled products and by conscientiously recycling everyday objects. Recycling is a very energy efficient process, says Robert Sinclair, Resource Recovery Specialist at Natural Resources Canada. “The energy required to make new from old is much less compared to making new from raw virgin materials,” he says. According to Statistics Canada, Canadians recycle just over 22 per cent of the solid waste — paper, plastic, metal and organic — we generate from our residential, industrial, commercial and institutional, and construction and demolition sectors. That means there is still room for improvement. Sinclair is involved in a project to determine how much of the remaining discarded waste is still recyclable. It seems that people who do recycle are less likely to recycle the materials that have been more recently targeted by municipal recycling programs. “When we did some waste audits in Ottawa, for example, we found that materials that had been around the longest did best, such as newspapers, soft drink cans and glass bottles,” says Sinclair. “But new materials — mixed fine papers, aluminum foil and boxboard such as in cereal boxes — aren’t recycled as much as they should be.” Increasing the amount of paper recycling alone would make a difference. As much as 65 per cent of a city’s discarded paper can be technically recyclable, according to some municipal waste audits. “We could do a lot better in the paper area,” says Sinclair. And he has a practical suggestion for a place to start: “Wherever you open mail and sort paper in your household, put a small recycling container right there. For me, that’s worked really well.”
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