Showing posts with label East Vancouver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label East Vancouver. Show all posts
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Regional Recycling is on Evans at the east end and north side of Terminal -- Google Maps.[/caption]
The Regional Recycling Vancouver bottle depot is now open at 7 a.m. every day. The Encorp Return-It depot still hasn't changed the hours on their Web site but word of the change is spreading among their customers. It was confirmed to me by an email from Regional Vancouver's manager Arlene Watson.
Regional's decision to begin opening one hour earlier comes ahead of another bottle depot's move into the area. United We Can is scheduled to move from the Downtown Eastside to Industrial Avenue any day now.
The United We Can bottle depot at 39 East Hastings Street is apparently still at 39 East Hastings Street even though yesterday ( January 15) was widely reported as the date it was to move to its new location on 455 Industrial Avenue.
Regional Recycling is on Evans at the east end and north side of Terminal -- Google Maps.[/caption]The Regional Recycling Vancouver bottle depot is now open at 7 a.m. every day. The Encorp Return-It depot still hasn't changed the hours on their Web site but word of the change is spreading among their customers. It was confirmed to me by an email from Regional Vancouver's manager Arlene Watson.
Regional's decision to begin opening one hour earlier comes ahead of another bottle depot's move into the area. United We Can is scheduled to move from the Downtown Eastside to Industrial Avenue any day now.
United We Can bottle depot hasn't moved yet
The United We Can bottle depot at 39 East Hastings Street is apparently still at 39 East Hastings Street even though yesterday ( January 15) was widely reported as the date it was to move to its new location on 455 Industrial Avenue.
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I can't find any bedbugs in Fairview. This old photo of a sleeping mouse will have to do.[/caption]
This morning's daily Blatt provided an evocative tableau on its cover: the banner headline "Infested" atop a larger-than-life rat snout.
"Umm, coffee, two eggs, and a side of Downtown Eastside for breakfast this morning?" I thought to myself.
Pretty much, but with a judicial twist; the story described how Vancouver's provincial courthouse on Main street, smack in the heart of the DTES was having escalating problems with bedbugs, mice and now rats.
I can't find any bedbugs in Fairview. This old photo of a sleeping mouse will have to do.[/caption]This morning's daily Blatt provided an evocative tableau on its cover: the banner headline "Infested" atop a larger-than-life rat snout.
"Umm, coffee, two eggs, and a side of Downtown Eastside for breakfast this morning?" I thought to myself.
Pretty much, but with a judicial twist; the story described how Vancouver's provincial courthouse on Main street, smack in the heart of the DTES was having escalating problems with bedbugs, mice and now rats.
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There are bottles all over Vancouver but not bottles depots.[/caption]
There are persistent rumours that the fellow who ran the now shuttered Westside Return-It bottle depot is looking at a location for a new Kitsilano bottle depot somewhere near 4th Avenue and Alma Street. This would be about eight blocks, or a kilometre -- depending how you walk it -- from the old location. Sounds too good to be true, but it is true that in the three months since his bottle depot on West Broadway and Blenheim closed it's doors at the end of July, Sam, the licence holder, has been looking for a new location.
Someone who spoke to him at a recent conference of bottle depot owners, said that he had chosen a location, but nothing was settled. Among other things, he would need the approval of the city, and I have no idea how long that process might take. I've been told he has one year to find a new location before Encorp, the industry stewardship group which oversees the Return-It bottle depot system, rescinds his licence to run a depot.
With no bottle depot in Kitsilano, most of the west side's collected beverage containers are being cashed in at two east Vancouver Return-It bottle depots: Go Green, at 7th and Ontario, and Regional Recycling, at 960 Evans Avenue, on the north side of the east end of Terminal Avenue. Go Green's business hasn't doubled but it's customer volume is up considerably. I don't go to Regional very often, but I'm told their volume has increased also.
In the case of Go Green, it's easy to single out the former Westside regulars; they're the ones who ask for a receipt or are surprised they don't get one. Westside used a computer system with touch screen input to record container types and total the returnable value. Go Green, has, for some 16 years done the counting and totaling manually. But they're in the process of installing two touch screen-driven computer systems. They tell me Encorp has been encouraging them to do this for years. Many of the folks coming from Kitsilano are ordinary binner types. There are also car binners, and residents. A few in this last group have caused memorable scenes, complaining about the smell, all but recoiling from the proximity of actual "street people" and, in one instance, asserting their right to special treatment by declaring: "I'm not a binner!"
The Westside depot was small -- somewhere between a third, to half the size of Go Green. Westside got their fair share of binners but, lots of Kitsilano residents also. The depot seemed full with five customers, so the residential-types could never be overwhelmed by street people-types. That's not the case with the much larger Go Green where you can have about 12 customers sorting bottles at one time.
Staff at Go Green told me of a recent telephone inquiry. A woman called the bottle depot to to say she wanted to bring in her bottles, and asked when was a good time to to come in when there weren't many homeless people. Unfortunately the staff lost the connection with the caller before a suitable answer could be formulated. Darn!
There are bottles all over Vancouver but not bottles depots.[/caption]There are persistent rumours that the fellow who ran the now shuttered Westside Return-It bottle depot is looking at a location for a new Kitsilano bottle depot somewhere near 4th Avenue and Alma Street. This would be about eight blocks, or a kilometre -- depending how you walk it -- from the old location. Sounds too good to be true, but it is true that in the three months since his bottle depot on West Broadway and Blenheim closed it's doors at the end of July, Sam, the licence holder, has been looking for a new location.
Someone who spoke to him at a recent conference of bottle depot owners, said that he had chosen a location, but nothing was settled. Among other things, he would need the approval of the city, and I have no idea how long that process might take. I've been told he has one year to find a new location before Encorp, the industry stewardship group which oversees the Return-It bottle depot system, rescinds his licence to run a depot.
The daily migration of bottles to East Vancouver
With no bottle depot in Kitsilano, most of the west side's collected beverage containers are being cashed in at two east Vancouver Return-It bottle depots: Go Green, at 7th and Ontario, and Regional Recycling, at 960 Evans Avenue, on the north side of the east end of Terminal Avenue. Go Green's business hasn't doubled but it's customer volume is up considerably. I don't go to Regional very often, but I'm told their volume has increased also.
When worlds collide
In the case of Go Green, it's easy to single out the former Westside regulars; they're the ones who ask for a receipt or are surprised they don't get one. Westside used a computer system with touch screen input to record container types and total the returnable value. Go Green, has, for some 16 years done the counting and totaling manually. But they're in the process of installing two touch screen-driven computer systems. They tell me Encorp has been encouraging them to do this for years. Many of the folks coming from Kitsilano are ordinary binner types. There are also car binners, and residents. A few in this last group have caused memorable scenes, complaining about the smell, all but recoiling from the proximity of actual "street people" and, in one instance, asserting their right to special treatment by declaring: "I'm not a binner!"
The Westside depot was small -- somewhere between a third, to half the size of Go Green. Westside got their fair share of binners but, lots of Kitsilano residents also. The depot seemed full with five customers, so the residential-types could never be overwhelmed by street people-types. That's not the case with the much larger Go Green where you can have about 12 customers sorting bottles at one time.
Hello. Hello?
Staff at Go Green told me of a recent telephone inquiry. A woman called the bottle depot to to say she wanted to bring in her bottles, and asked when was a good time to to come in when there weren't many homeless people. Unfortunately the staff lost the connection with the caller before a suitable answer could be formulated. Darn!
Vancouver's eighth annual Homeless Action Week started on Sunday, October 13, and runs to the 19th. With the Thanksgiving long weekend, HAW 2013 really started Tuesday, October 15 -- so how will the City of Vancouver be using these next five days to raise the issues of homelessness?This year's HAW is focused on the "invisible homeless," what physicists call "Transient Dark Matter." HAW organizers describe the "invisibly homeless" as people who have a shelter but not a home. They say the solution to homelessness starts with a home. This is so trite that it's easy to forget that it is exactly true
We're having the kind of Fall a person could fall in love with. I've tried to share a bit of my good fortune in the form of a patchwork panorama of Jonathan Rogers Park, just a few block from the Go Green bottle depot. Click the above crop to see the large 8505 x 1000 pixel version, and/or click the turn to see it as a long, sideways, strip.
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Click on the image to see just the site as it looks today.[/caption]
The owner of the Rep One Fitness club -- one door West of the former site of the Westside Return-It Centre, at 3311 W Broadway -- came out to ask why I was taking photos of the now empty space he holds the lease to, and will be expanding his fitness operation into. I explained "blog," "post," and "update." He relaxed and became as mild as a teddy bear covered in tattoos. He asked if the owners had found a new location. "No," I said, I didn't think so. I mentioned that one of the former employees was, in fact, now working at the Go Green bottle depot. He commented on the fact that Westside had been at that location for 19 years, before losing their lease, and closing on July 31, 2013.
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Rep One Fitness, the door on the left, will be expanding into the Westside's former location. Click the image to enlarge it.[/caption]
I was impressed, both because I hadn't known the Westside bottle depot had been there for nearly two decades. and because the Rep One owner (Mike, I think) didn't sound like someone happy to see the Westside bottle depot gone. He didn't say he missed it either.
Certainly all the binners who used to cash in their bottles at Westside miss it. It's a pain for all of them to now have to travel about 6 extra kilometres to the next closest depot: Go Green, which is, coincidentally, enjoying a nice increase in business.
Click on the image to see just the site as it looks today.[/caption]The owner of the Rep One Fitness club -- one door West of the former site of the Westside Return-It Centre, at 3311 W Broadway -- came out to ask why I was taking photos of the now empty space he holds the lease to, and will be expanding his fitness operation into. I explained "blog," "post," and "update." He relaxed and became as mild as a teddy bear covered in tattoos. He asked if the owners had found a new location. "No," I said, I didn't think so. I mentioned that one of the former employees was, in fact, now working at the Go Green bottle depot. He commented on the fact that Westside had been at that location for 19 years, before losing their lease, and closing on July 31, 2013.
[caption id="attachment_5239" align="alignright" width="204"]
Rep One Fitness, the door on the left, will be expanding into the Westside's former location. Click the image to enlarge it.[/caption]I was impressed, both because I hadn't known the Westside bottle depot had been there for nearly two decades. and because the Rep One owner (Mike, I think) didn't sound like someone happy to see the Westside bottle depot gone. He didn't say he missed it either.
Certainly all the binners who used to cash in their bottles at Westside miss it. It's a pain for all of them to now have to travel about 6 extra kilometres to the next closest depot: Go Green, which is, coincidentally, enjoying a nice increase in business.
November 2013 -- still no new Kits bottle depot, just rumours ►
Sitting on a bench, on the sun dappled South-East corner of Oak Street, and 10th Avenue, munching a wrap, and watching the cars go by, something made me think about the shark fin protesters which, for months, were a regular, weekly feature outside a Chinese restaurant across from the McDonalds at Granville, on Broadway. I hadn't seen them since March.
According to VARK, the restaurant, Fortune Garden, agreed in March to remove shark fin soup from their menu. After eight months of noisy, passionate, protests, every Friday evening outside the restaurant ("Honk if you love sharks!), by the Animal Defence League, Fortune Garden apparently came to see the merits of the protesters' reasoned arguments. Three cheers for the Civil Society!
Basically, why so stubborn? Last July, even the Chinese government announced shark fin soup was off the menu at future state banquets. ► I've never tasted shark fin soup, but I don't care how good it might be, given the bad outcome it's helping cause. Speaking as a person who is ethnically half-Chinese, I do not believe Chinese cuisine is so lacking in menu choices that a restaurant need cling to any dish, particularly one so clearly linked to the near extinction of several shark species. I hope people aren't treating this as a matter of national or ethnic pride.
Meanwhile, the Vancouver Animal Defence League moved their Friday evening protest to the Sun Sui Wah restaurant at 3888 Main St. where the management has not exactly welcomed them with open arms. ►
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VADL protesters outside Sun Sui Wah. Photo: Dan Toulgoet. Click the image to go to the original Vancouver Courier article.[/caption]
It may be gratuitous to blog this, but it's something I see from time to time in the lanes; an open letter from the robbed to the robber; I found this one on a utility pole, just blocks from the boundary between Fairview, and Mount Pleasant. I think it says more about the resident who wrote it, than the thief who will be no more moved by the plea, than they were by any feelings of human empathy, when they stole, in the first place.
This letter clearly asserts the writer's values, and humanity, in unspoken contrast to those of the thief. They are saying they can empathize with the thief up to a certain point, and no father. I would suggest letters like this help the writers to reconcile themselves to the thefts, and the world in which they will take place. Of course, I could certainly be over analysing something as simple as their wanting their damn stuff back. Click the image to enlarge.
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Poster for this Year's Car Free Day, on a pole in the West End, at Denman and Davie. Click the image to enlarge.[/caption]
Four Vancouver neighbourhoods enjoyed a Car Free Father's Day on Sunday. Sections of Mount Pleasant's Main Street, East Vancouver's Commercial Drive, West Broadway, in Kitsilano, and Denman Avenue, in the West End, said no to cars and yes to pedestrians, cyclists, pet parades, musicians, and, in the West End, a big yes, to big bags of cigarette butts. ▼ The first Car Free Day was in 2005, on Commercial Drive, in the working class neighbourhood of East Vancouver. Year-by-year, the event is established in more neighbourhoods, along-side other popular neighbourhood block parties, such as Kitsilano's Greek Day, which is next Sunday, June 23, and East Vancouver's Italian Day, which was two weeks ago, on June 9.
Apparently, according to a National Post article, our city's administration is looking to combat loneliness in Vancouver with block parties, "lots of block parties. Soon, on a pre-determined Block Party Day, the people of Vancouver could traverse their entire city on overlapping networks of block parties and “see what each neighbourhood is made of,” The Post quotes our Mayor, Gregor Robertson, as saying.
According to an item in this morning's Province, newspaper, one of the groups pushing for a British Columbia-wide deposit program for cigarette butts, put their money where their mouth was, at Sunday's West End Car Free Day, The group called West End Cleanup, says it took in more than 60,000 cigarette butts, at a penny-a-butt, or $20 per pound. The group's spokesperson John Merzetti, pointed to a "snapshot" taken of 17 blocks in the West End, which found 25,000 cigarette butts littering the streets. ▲
Wow! I poked fun at the whole idea in an earlier post, but perhaps I should just butt out of this discussion. I guess there are a whole lot more cigarette smokers downtown than in my neighbourhood of Fairview.
Poster for this Year's Car Free Day, on a pole in the West End, at Denman and Davie. Click the image to enlarge.[/caption]Four Vancouver neighbourhoods enjoyed a Car Free Father's Day on Sunday. Sections of Mount Pleasant's Main Street, East Vancouver's Commercial Drive, West Broadway, in Kitsilano, and Denman Avenue, in the West End, said no to cars and yes to pedestrians, cyclists, pet parades, musicians, and, in the West End, a big yes, to big bags of cigarette butts. ▼ The first Car Free Day was in 2005, on Commercial Drive, in the working class neighbourhood of East Vancouver. Year-by-year, the event is established in more neighbourhoods, along-side other popular neighbourhood block parties, such as Kitsilano's Greek Day, which is next Sunday, June 23, and East Vancouver's Italian Day, which was two weeks ago, on June 9.
City-wide Block Party Day?
Apparently, according to a National Post article, our city's administration is looking to combat loneliness in Vancouver with block parties, "lots of block parties. Soon, on a pre-determined Block Party Day, the people of Vancouver could traverse their entire city on overlapping networks of block parties and “see what each neighbourhood is made of,” The Post quotes our Mayor, Gregor Robertson, as saying.
Penny per butt popular at West End Car Free Day
According to an item in this morning's Province, newspaper, one of the groups pushing for a British Columbia-wide deposit program for cigarette butts, put their money where their mouth was, at Sunday's West End Car Free Day, The group called West End Cleanup, says it took in more than 60,000 cigarette butts, at a penny-a-butt, or $20 per pound. The group's spokesperson John Merzetti, pointed to a "snapshot" taken of 17 blocks in the West End, which found 25,000 cigarette butts littering the streets. ▲
Wow! I poked fun at the whole idea in an earlier post, but perhaps I should just butt out of this discussion. I guess there are a whole lot more cigarette smokers downtown than in my neighbourhood of Fairview.
Vancouver City Councillor Adriane Carr throws her support behind the butt deposit ►
Sitting on the grass, a door-or-two East of Columbia Street, on the South side of 8th Avenue, across from Jonathon Rogers Park, just a door West of Milano Coffee, which has a "pour-over" coffee which will remind your taste buds why they liked the stuff in the first place.
Sirens! Emergency first responders! Ambulance, fire truck -- where's the emergency? The ambulance rounds the block. Swings by. Slows to a crawl. The paramedic in the passenger seat takes a hard look at me -- should I feign some head trauma just to make him feel better? He asks if I called "it" in. "No," I say, remembering to shake my head side-to-side, rather than up-and-down. When I next notice the ambulance, it's parked on the corner, as you can see (though it wasn't jittering like that). One paramedic is in the driver's side, the other -- I couldn't see. I hope, as always, that it wasn't serious.
Otherwise, such a pleasant day and place to spend some of it. Just so you know, Jonathon Rogers Park is near both Guardian Storage, where I have a locker, and the Go Green bottle depot where most of the bottles and cans I collect end up. Area residents (affectionately?) refer to it as "the Homeless Guy Park."
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