Elmvale Water Festival calls on Canadians to move towards Zero Waste

September 4th, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Festival shows how big events can produce little or no waste
ELMVALE — September 3, 2009 – It was one of Ontario’s most refreshing “zero waste” summer events: a festival dedicated to celebrating water. The Elmvale Water Festival (EWF), a free day-long event designed to educate the public about the value of our water resources and the need to protect them for future generations, attracted well over 1,000 people to the town of Elmvale, Ontario for its third annual festival on Saturday, August 22, 2009.
This unique festival played host to several key minds on issues of water and its role in our environment, including keynote speaker and veteran journalist Chris Wood. In addition to live music, local food, and free local spring water for all attendees, the EWF was held using “green” power from Bullfrog Power, and all waste from the event was collected, sorted, and recycled or returned to local vendors.
“Imagine 1000 plus people of all ages attending an event, and at the end of the day ending up with one bag of garbage. The rest was sorted and returned or recycled,” says Dr. William Shotyk, founder of the Elmvale Foundation and the EWF and a Canadian professor at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. “Imagine if we could make this part of our everyday lifestyle, we’d see our existing landfills in Elmvale and surrounding areas last well into the next century.”
Dr. Shotyk and EWF Executive Director Michael Powell were amazed at what the Zero Waste Event volunteers were able to accomplish.
End results of the Zero Waste Elmvale Water Festival Challenge:
5 bags of Compost – diverted by local farmers for feed/compost.
The following items – diverted for recycling included:
4 bundles of OCC (old corrugated cardboard);
2 bags of paper;
1 bag of boxboard;
1 bag of film plastic;
1 bag of aluminum/cans;
1/2 bag of styrofoam;
1/2 bag of plastic containers;
1/4 bag of tetraboxes;
1 HDPE pail and;
1 glass jar.
Also, 1/2 a bag of Tim Horton cups – delivered back to the Elmvale Tim Hortons store.
AND 1 bag of garbage!
Dr. Shotyk, whose research focuses on the study of trace metals in the environment, has long believed that the spring water found near his family’s farm near Elmvale, Ontario is the best tasting water anywhere. Scientific testing proved that Springwater Township, in which Elmvale is located, has some of the cleanest naturally-occurring groundwater in Canada, a discovery that helped inspire Shotyk to create the EWF
“The incredible quality of our water – including our tap water – means we have absolutely no reason to import or buy any bottled water – just turn on the tap and fill up a reusable bottle. And this pristine water must be protected from the toxic effects of landfills. We need to protect this resource to ensure our future,” says Dr. Shotyk.
ABOUT THE ELMVALE FOUNDATION
The Elmvale Water Festival is hosted by the Elmvale Foundation (www.elmvale.org), a Canadian, federally registered charity for environmental education. “We protect what we value, we value what we understand.”
ABOUT ELMVALE WATER FESTIVAL FOUNDER, DR. WILLIAM SHOTYK
William Shotyk founded the Elmvale Foundation in 2007, a registered charity for environmental science education, and serves as the foundation’s president and CEO. He was born in the Village of Swansea, now part of the City of Toronto, Ontario. He received his B.Sc. (Agr.) in Soil Science and Chemistry from the University of Guelph in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Western Ontario in 1987. Following postdoctoral research at the University of California, Riverside and UWO, he worked at the University of Berne in Switzerland where he completed a Habilitation in Geochemistry, in 1995. After 12 years at the University of Berne, he became Professor at the University of Heidelberg and Director of the Institute of Environmental Geochemistry, in October of 2000. His research group is responsible for Inorganic Environmental Geochemistry, with state-of-the-art metal-free clean lab facilities and sector-field ICP-MS for measuring trace elements and Pb isotope ratios at extremely low concentrations. The main research areas are human impacts on the geochemical cycles of potentially toxic trace elements such as Pb, Sb, As, Cd and Hg, including archives of atmospheric change (ombrotrophic peat bogs and polar ice cores), fate in soils and sediments, and impacts on natural freshwaters. A member of the American Chemical Society, American Geophysical Union, and the Geochemical Society, he has published more than 170 articles, including 130 in refereed journals, as well as in conference proceedings, books, and newspapers.
For more information on Zero Waste Events and The Elmvale Water Festival: Dr. Bill Shotyk Founder, Elmvale Water Foundation bill@elmvale.org; Dr. Michael Powell Executive Director, Elmvale Water Festival mike@elmvale.org
For further information about the water testing, see li‘Interview with Dr. William Shotyk.’