- More than 25 million ready-to-serve drinks are sold in the NWT each year. - Beverage containers are one of the major components of litter and waste disposal in the NWT. - The NWT and Nunavut are the only two jurisdictions in Canada without beverage container legislation. - Research shows that there is 10 times more employment with recycling than with landfilling. - A beverage container recycling program could provide over $500,000 annually in new salaries and wages for the NWT. - Manufacturing aluminum cans from 100 per cent recycled materials takes only five per cent of the energy needed to make aluminum cans from raw materials. - The Yukon beverage container recycling program repaid start-up costs in the first two years of production.

Katherine Thiesenhausen, Inuvik Recycling Society Vice President said the society has been prodding the GNWT for over a year to institute beverage container deposit legislation. The group sent a representative to Yellowknife last year, to provide input on a discussion paper the GNWT had released, but have not seen the results from that work.

"Our understanding is, that a legislative proposal has been drafted and provided to Jim Antoine's (minister of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development) office, but it seems to have stalled there," Thiesenhausen said.

The society has been unable to get a copy of the draft legislation and Thiesenhausen believes the petition may prod the government into moving on the legislation.

"It's not that we think they are being secretive about it, but we are a little impatient and we'd like to see this move forward," she said.

The board was waiting to see what kind of response would be generated by the petition before deciding on how to proceed. Judging from the huge response they received over the weekend, Thiesenhausen said the recycling issue is obviously very important to Inuvik, but since the legislation is territorial, they will be seeking input from other groups.

"We've been having some conversations with Ecology North in Yellowknife," Thiesenhausen said. "They've also launched an education campaign on this issue."

The society will be forwarding copies of the petition to Delta MLAs and Antoine had not returned calls as of presstime.