A Delbrook woman is giving the North Vancouver Recreation and Culture Commission a slap on the wrists for using thousands of disposable plastic wristbands at local rec centres.
Jodi Booth addressed District of North Vancouver council Monday night after collecting more than 100 of the wristbands from the streets, sidewalks, ditches and streams around the new Delbrook Recreation Centre over the last three months.
Rec centre staff use the wristbands to ensure gym and pool users have paid for admission but Booth says they’re a wasteful use of resources and an unnecessary pollutant.
“What really irked me first is that they’re creating waste and garbage and there’s a stream right there. It’s all plastic going into the stream and eventually the ocean,” she said. “I started returning them to the rec centre. They weren’t super impressed with that, which I can understand why.”
Staff put out a special bin for folks leaving the gym and pool asking them to deposit their wristbands for “recycling.” But when Booth investigated that further, she found the Tyvek plastic bands are actually sent to the trash, something the rec commission confirmed.
“We were under the impression they were recyclable but when we explored it further with the district, what we discovered is that if we collected them, they would have to be transported outside of the North Shore and be incinerated and the cost was pretty exceptional,” said Cathy Matheson, manager of support services of the rec commission.
Matheson said the rec commission goes through 1,400 to 2,000 of the wristbands every week across all of its facilities in North Vancouver.
It’s ironic, Booth said, given that there is a plaque on the second floor of the Delbrook rec centre proclaiming how sustainable the new building is.
Booth is lobbying the rec commission to start using hand stamps or paper receipts or abandon proof of admission altogether. “If a few people are going to sneak in, is it the end of the world if people are exercising instead of doing whatever else?” she said.
Coun. Lisa Muri wrote to Booth following Monday’s meeting, saying she’d taken the issue to staff at the rec commission. Matheson said staff are now discussing the matter.
“We take our role … seriously as environmental stewards so when we receive input from residents such as this, we will study it. We’ll look for alternatives,” she said. “We’re in that process of exploring that right now.”
That may mean eventually switching to a system of turnstiles or gates operated by membership cards.
“We just don’t have that technology in place yet but we are moving to that in the future,” Matheson said.
