Feel free to copy this letter and send it with your signature to any of the Tim Horton's executives listed on this blog. Remember to reformat the endnotes using the superscript function found in your Microsoft Office (or
Open Office) Format area (format - font, or format - character in Open Office).
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Use this letter if you want to rant at them both on the air pollution issue stemming from drive-throughs, and the recycling / littering problem.
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Paul D. House
Chairman Tim Horton's Inc
874 Sinclair Rd.
Oakville, Ontario L6K 2Y1
March 19, 2009
Dear Sir:
In recent months I have come to be very concerned that fundamental aspects of the Tim Horton's business model have grave consequences for the personal health of Canadians, and for the planet in general.
My concerns are focused in two areas: the air pollution caused by drive-throughs, and the negative aspects of the disposable coffee cup - which include the trees cut down and energy used to create the cups, the fact that most Tim Horton's cups are not recycled, but end up in landfills, and the fact that the very disposability of the cups naturally leads them to be thickly layered along the sides of highways and streets throughout Canada.
In this era of IPCC reports, free screenings of An Inconvenient Truth, reports of massive C02 emissions leading to increased acidity of the oceans, killing marine life and destroying fish stocks, air pollution has very much taken a back stage to climate change. A thorough search of current air pollution research shows however that air pollution is having a disastrous effect on the health of Canadians. The Ontario Medical Association has cited the number of deaths in southern Ontario, due to smog, at 5800 for 2005
(1). Toronto Public Health has found that 440 premature deaths per year in Toronto are tied directly to traffic pollution, with an additional 1700 hospitalizations. They also find air pollution from traffic causing children 1200 acute bronchitis attacks per year
(2). Other studies have found that children living in smoggy areas lose 1% of their lung capacity every year
(3); that pregnant women who live for as little as a month in a high smog area are three times as likely to have a baby with a physical deformity as women living in healthier areas
(4); that children living within a quarter mile of a freeway have an 89% higher risk of developing asthma than those who live a mile away
(5).
Rest assured that I am aware of the study, funded by your company and used to strike down the “Idle Free Zone” website hosted by Natural Resources Canada
(6), wherein RWDI Consultants in Guelph found that more C02 emissions are caused by parking your car, walking into a fast-food restaurant, and then restarting your car again upon leaving, than are caused by idling your car in the drive-through. However, I am also aware that over a year later this study is not available to the public, and that it has been neither peer-reviewed or published in either an academic or trade journal. I am also aware that a university student who bases an essay around a non peer-reviewed and unpublished research study will receive a failing mark, and that until the RWDI study undergoes the peer-review process, it qualifies less as science than it does as rumour.
In short, I believe that the indirect costs of drive-through restaurants include not only greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, but also childhood asthma, increased mortality of senior citizens, and generally poor air quality for Canadians. I also believe that the best way to mitigate the dangers of drive-throughs is to decrease their attractiveness by the levying of stiff government taxes upon drive through items, making customers prefer to park and walk into the restaurant than to idle for extended periods in the drive-through line.
The second issue – that of the disposable cup – has especially been on my mind of late as spring has come to Ontario and Tim Horton's coffee cups are rising through the melting snow to be commonplace along the streets of my city. In an Oct. 21, 2005 article in Maclean's Magazine
(7), which reported on Tim Horton's accounting for 22% of all the roadside litter in Nova Scotia (with McDonald's a distant second at 10%), your spokesman, Greg Skinner, implied that Tim Horton's should not be responsible for what customers do with their disposable cups after their use. He also stated that Tim Horton's would not contemplate any anti-littering measures which would amount to a tax on their products (ie raising prices on disposable cups in order to pay for something similar to a “bottle return” system). Indeed, he said that education alone (presumably with “do not litter” messages written on the coffee cups) was the way to prevent people from dropping their disposable cups onto sidewalks and roadways.
Let me say that all of the Tim Horton's cups and lids along the streets and highways of Canada bear emphatic proof that “education” is not an anti-littering solution. The disposability of your cups leads them to become black marks on the faces of Canadian communities, and an economic burden which your company transfers to municipalities to clean up. Additionally, it is extremely troubling that in all of Canada, your cups are only recycled in a handful of cities, namely Moncton, NB and Windsor, ON. Everywhere else, to a tune of hundreds of millions of cups each year in Ontario alone
(8), Tim Horton's cups add to the already highly stressed state of Canadian landfills.
To answer questions about corporate responsibility with oblique references to “education” is not acceptable. In the 21st century, the stakes are too high for this, especially from a company which takes pride in its reputation as being quintessentially Canadian.
Tim Horton's must take ownership of the problems posed by its disposable cups, and the following are my suggestions:
a) Immediately launch a rewards system for the return of disposable cups to your locations. For example, in return for one clear plastic garbage bag of Tim Horton's cups and lids, people receive a $25.00 Tim Horton's gift card.
b) Strongly encourage the use of travel mugs by offering a significant price advantage for the use of personal mugs. A large coffee in a disposable cup should be at least .50cents higher than a large coffee in a travel mug.
c) Expand your recycling capabilities. Disposable cups must be diverted from landfills, and having only a handful of recycling facilities across the entire breadth of Canada is not good enough. At your own expense – not the expense of cash strapped municipalities – you must create disposable cup recycling capabilities not only in every province, but in every large metropolitan area.
Ronald Wright, in his 2004 work A Short History of Progress, wrote:
If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70% of nature's yearly output; by the early 1980s, we'd reached 100%, and in 1999, we were at 125%. Such numbers may be imprecise, but their trend is clear - they mark the road to bankruptcy(9).
The current Tim Horton's business model, appropriate in the political climate of the 1960s when the chain was founded, is no longer appropriate today – it is, without hyperbole, threatening our survival as a species.
Thank you for your time,
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Endnotes 1. Ontario Medical Assocation. (2005). The illness costs of air pollution: 2005-2026 health and economic damage estimates. (OMA Publication ISBN 0919047548). Retrieved August 1, 2008 from http://www.oma.org/phealth/ICAP2005Summary.pdf
2. Toronto Public Health. (2007). Air pollution burden of illness from traffic in Toronto: Problems and solutions. Retrieved August 1, 2008 from http://www.toronto.ca/health/hphe/pdf/air_pollution_burden.pdf
3. Gauderman, W.J., Avol, E., Gilliland, F., Vora, H., Thomas, D., Berhane, K., et al. (2004). The effect of air pollution on lung development from 10 to 18 years of age. New England Journal of Medicine, 351(11), 1057-1067.
4. Ritz, B., Yu, F., Fruin, S., Chapa, G., Shaw, G.M. & Harris, J. (2002). Ambient air pollution and risk of birth defects in southern California. American Journal of Epidemiology, 155(1), 17-25.
5. Gauderman, W.J., Avol, E., Lurmann, F., Kuenzli, N., Gilliland, F., Peter, J., et al. (2005). Childhood asthma and exposure to traffic and nitrogen dioxide. Epidemiology, 16(6), 737-743.
6. Feds revamp stance on idling after meeting with drive-thru group. CBC News Online, August 11, 2008. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/08/11/ot-drivethru-080811.html
7. Hawaleshka, D. (2005). The cups runneth over. Maclean's, Oct. 21, 2005. Retrieved from http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20051024_114048_114048
8. Tax On "Coffee Cup Recycling" Eyed & Decried. City News Online, May 11, 2007. Retrieved from http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_10916.aspx
9. Wright, R. (2004). A Short history of progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, p. 129.
