As a former country resident, growing up in the middle of nowhere in Ontario for my first seventeen years of life, and now a current urbanite in the City of Toronto, I have always had a love/hate relationship with both the city and the country.

What I love about the country- open spaces, fresh air, ability to have a piece of grass at your doorstep, I founded a completely opposite love when it came to the city- the fast pace and noise, the trips to the grocery store that didn’t take a half an hour because you happened to rent your apartment above a convience store, and that you could walk for miles and miles and never be bored of the scenery.

It never really occurred to me that the country would be at stake and suffering for the development of the city’s infrastructure. (I don’t mean townhouses and skyscrapers being built outwards into fields).

The Greenbelt, which stretches from the Niagara Region, around Toronto, past the Durham Region, and also up into Keswick, is a protected area where many of Ontario’s fruit and vegetables are grown, where the wine region is situated and where much of Ontario’s natural beauty lies. The Greenbelt, in the past, has been used as a digging ground for sand, gravel and stone in order to build up the Greater Toronto Area. These substances, which are better known as Aggregate, are used to build roads, bridges, sidewalks and buildings.

According to the Toronto Environmental Alliance, torontoenvironment.org , and industry estimates, “the GTA will use about 1.5 billion tones of aggregate over the next 25 years”. This means that the beautiful countryside surrounding the GTA will no longer feature fields of grass and fresh air, but gravel quarry pits to fuel the development of the city.

It is possible to stop the hazardous practices that are happening to the outskirts of the GTA by practicing everybody’s favorite three ‘R’s : Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Asphalt can be reused to repave roads, building codes and road designs can be reduced to the previous 6.5 meter standard of the past rather than today’s 8.5 meter roads, and instead of mixing new concrete, crushed concrete can be recycled in construction projects and used first to reduce unnecessary materials.

To find out more and what you can do to reduce such waste in your surrounding city suburban area check out: torontoenvironment.org/gravel/recommendations.

Read more about the hidden – and best – places around the province of Ontario in Ron Brown’s book Backroads of Ontario.

Image courtesy of greenbelt.ca

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