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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2019-05-30, Page 5Other Views The shelf life for a website? 5 years The world’s suffocating in plastic Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense In the coming weeks, North Huron Publishing will unveil three new websites: one for each of its major publications. The Citizen, The Rural Voice and Stops Along the Way will all have their own space on the internet, replacing northhuron.on.ca as the one-stop shop for the publications. The change comes approximately five years after North Huron Publishing unveiled its new website in 2014, replacing an even older site that had been around for years. What does this mean for loyal readers? Well, first and foremost, you need to know the new addresses. For the past year or so, the URLs stopsalongtheway.ca and ruralvoice.ca have been directed to their respective part of the North Huron Publishing Company website. We now add huroncitizen.ca to the group, which will direct to, you guessed it, The Citizen.Don’t worry, northhuron.on.ca will still direct you to The Citizen as well, so you don’t need to change your bookmarks. While it may seem like just yesterday that we updated our website, bringing it into the modern era (and trust me, if you feel that way, there are a few of my co-workers who share that sentiment), the sad fact is that five years is a long time on the internet. Heck, five minutes can be a long time on the internet if you accidentally start reading comments. All jokes aside, five years is a long time for a website to remain the same and, while we all loved the new interface and amount of control our then-new website gave us over what information we could share and how we could share it, that new website smell wore off. What once was new and cool in our eyes has become a little clunky and some of the features just don’t work as well as they used to. I’m sure everyone over the age of 30 can relate to that, if my experience is any guide. With the new websites we came to the realization that, while there is undoubtedly a lot of crossover between people who read the three publications, they do serve different purposes. The Citizen, for example, is something that people can visit every day and find something new to read about Blyth, Brussels and the surrounding communities. Stops Along the Way, however, has a clearer mandate of providing tourism information, which makes it require a different kind of website and, to be frank, a more simplistic user interface to speed people along to their destinations. The Rural Voice will be similar to The Citizen, but with more of a focus on agriculture. One of the big additions to our web presence with the three new websites is for advertisers as, once we implement web advertising sales, we will be able to help advertisers target their ad dollars a little bit more effectively. Previously, the few advertisements that we did have on the page could be seen by people looking for agricultural news, local news or tourism information. Now we will be able to make sure that everyone who sees an advertisement will be its target audience. On top of that, it will help us here in the editorial departments of the three publications to better help people find interesting information. By virtue of Citizen articles having their own corner of the internet, you can be sure that everything you see online at our website will have the same focus: local news for people in our coverage area. There are a lot of reasons I’m excited about this project, not the least of which is, like the last website update, I’m driving a significant portion of the work ahead of it. Alongside Publisher Deb Sholdice, I’ve looked at what works on our website and what doesn’t and decided what the new website should look like. Things are changing. There’s no getting around that. The new sites will all feature a cleaner user interface designed to be less cluttered. On top of that, we’ve also gotten away from a one-size-fits-all photo space which, to be honest, didn’t really fit all the photos we wanted on the website. Some of the changes won’t be readily apparent to readers, like the improved backend user interface that, with a little continuing education for folks in my office, will hopefully make maintaining the website easier. There are also new style guides being implemented which will help make sure that, within each of the three sites, we’re adhering to new layout guidelines to make for the best possible experience for our readers and advertisers. In the end though, the thing I’m most excited about is the fact that The Citizen, alongside Stops Along the Way and The Rural Voice are moving forward, and putting a new focus on digital content and advertising. You might think that comes from my role with the website, but it really comes from me being a reporter. I’m excited that, with a new forum, we will be able to better distribute the hard work we do on a weekly basis. So don’t be surprised when you log on to The Citizen’s website in the near future and notice a big difference. It just means we’re evolving to serve you better. Denny Scott Denny’s Den THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MAY 30, 2019. PAGE 5. You are the problem Where could I possibly be going with this one? Because, really, we are the problem in so very many aspects of life. Whether it’s climate change, the troubling political direction of the world (fueled, in many cases, by xenophobia) or any number of issues, we have no one to blame but ourselves. This week the problem we represent is one of being resistant to change in our neighbourhoods, very often for selfish reasons. Here at The Citizen, Denny and I cover developments and planning matters handled at local council meetings. Whether someone is wanting to build a shed or a new barn or open a business, they need to go through the process of ensuring it will comply with the rules and maintain reasonable living conditions for neighbours. Another aspect of daily life here at The Citizen is writing about all of the people who are opposed to these proposed changes. So, while planning is in place to ensure things are compatible and pleasing to all residents, complaints can often go too far, leading to disgruntled neighbours standing in the way of changes and, sometimes, progress. The latest was at Central Huron Council last week. A closed church may very well be taken down to be replaced with a 60-unit senior living complex. Sounds like a great addition to the community, right? Especially in Huron County with its high percentage of seniors. Well, it didn’t sound like a great addition to everyone. There were a few neighbours with the common refrain in situations like these: increased traffic, reduced parking on the street and, frankly, one man said, he moved to rural Ontario for a certain way of life that involved a quiet street and plenty of parking. You hear that last one a lot. Sure, it would be nice to have that development, but how will it impact my neat little corner of the world? The second someone moves to a rural area, they instantly become the mayor, dictating terms. I have heard this dozens of times. I could cite many recent examples just in Blyth. Outdoor concerts that would bring thousands of people (and their money) to the village were protested for being too loud, opponents said. There were the people who had concerns about the new subdivision in the north end of Blyth. Then there was the fire hall. We had a petition when it was proposed on North Street – that was, of course, before the other petition and the massive uprising in the middle against the ball diamond location proposal. There was resistance to the new houses in Belgrave. Not only were people upset about losing their park (which wasn’t a park), they didn’t like the look of the houses, nor did they like that they would attract – hold your nose and cover your mouth – renters. There goes the neighbourhood. (Extreme sarcasm intended.) That’s not even getting into the neighbourly squabbles that are commonplace in these situations. Neighbour A wants to build a shed, but that might threaten Neighbour B’s quality of life, so the arguments begin. Those are just a few examples, but getting back to this column’s title, rural Ontario residents can be their own worst enemy at times. Things change. We need to grow the tax base, we need people to move here, we need stores, services and businesses, so don’t make life a living hell for those brave enough to invest their money in your community just because you thought you were buying a time capsule instead of a house. If you want your community to grow and progress, you need to be supportive of that change, rather than leaving it up to everyone else while you live happily in your bubble. While the Canadian media, in months past, searched hard for scandals to embarrass the government, it paid scant attention to a real scandal – the 1,500 tonnes of Canadian garbage that has been rotting in Manila, Philippines since 2014. Last week the federal government finally announced that the garbage would be coming home, to be incinerated in a plant near Vancouver that generates electricity from burning garbage. After two Canadian governments failed to act, Philippines’ President Rodrigo finally got Canadians’ attention by suggesting he’d declare war on Canada if we didn’t take back the garbage and recalling his country’s ambassador. The garbage was packed in 69 shipping containers marked as plastic for recycling in facilities near Manila, but when the containers were opened they were filled with raw garbage. The private company that shipped the garbage certainly wasn’t about to take the garbage back so the federal government was stuck with the problem. Sadly both the Conservative government of Stephen Harper and the Liberals under Justin Trudeau didn’t make it a priority to clean up this Canadian mess. This whole episode has typified the crisis we find ourselves in as a result of our modern consumer society. With our modern packaging and throw-away culture, we’re burying ourselves in garbage. We fill up landfills in what seems like a jiffy, then people fight when municipalities want to turn a neighbouring area into a new landfill. To extend the life of garbage dumps, municipalities embraced recycling, but issues like the Philippines scandal resulted. We began shipping plastics to China and other Asian countries for recycling. At the beginning of 2018 China banned the importing of plastic because it had more than enough already there. Since then, plastic waste has flooded into Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, often through disreputable operators, leading to dumping and open burning, contaminating water supplies, killing crops and causing respiratory illnesses. The plastic issue is an example of passing the buck. For manufacturers, plastic is often the most profitable solution. Take the situation with some food products, for example. Plastic jars are cheaper than glass jars so they use plastic. Once it leaves their plant, it’s not their problem. We consumers get that jar and use the product that’s in it and want to dispose of the container. Consumers tend to think that plastic is plastic. I only discovered that isn’t so while doing a story years ago on a company that turned bale wrap into plastic lumber. Every plastic has a different chemical composition, they explained to me, and if you’re a company wanting to reuse it, you have to have plastic made up of the same polymer. That’s not so easy in household waste, which is why your municipality gives you a list of what is, and what is not, acceptable. (Then there’s the problem of convincing people to clean the container before its recycled so it’s usable.) So we throw our plastic jar in the blue box and now it’s the municipality’s problem to deal with. But markets for different polymers change quickly and plastics that had value last week are sent to the landfill this week. And sometimes, the ultimate pass-along of the problem is to export our mess to other countries. Canadians, according to a 2017 Canadian Geographic story, each produce 720 kilograms of garbage a year, more than any other industrialized country (seven per cent more than Americans). We are particularly addicted to plastic. We use 3 billion single-use plastic bags per year – the average length of use being 20 minutes. Scientists estimate it takes 500 to 1,000 years for that bag to break down. Just in littering alone, Canadians create a 29,000-tonne problem. It’s also estimated that 10,000 tonnes of plastic enter the Great Lakes every year. If the world doesn’t clean up its act, some scientists estimate that by 2050 there will be more pounds of plastic than fish in the world’s oceans. What can we do? We can stop pushing the problem off to the next guy. Manufacturers need to take responsibility and reduce plastic use by legislation if they won’t use their consciences. We need better ways to reuse plastic, creating plants here in Canada to do the job instead of sending waste to Asia. It’s been estimated this would create thousands of jobs. As well, if we could properly recycle materials here at home, it’s been estimated this could add $11 billion to the economy. And finally, we consumers must reduce the plastic we use. We can choose products with the least wasted plastic. We can cut our own use of plastic bags. We can reuse containers. We can properly recycle. We each need to take responsibility for our share of this massive problem. Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk