A glass half-full and getting fuller

October 21-27 is an important week!

Last week, I finished a Master Composter/Recycler "refresher course." It was well worth the time and effort to attend ten classes, two of them full days at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre and Compost's Cool.

When I became an MCR in 2007, things were quite different. Edmonton's Waste Management was considered world class, with an amazing system that saw Edmontonians using blue bags for recycling, Eco Stations for Household Hazardous Wastes and bulky items, and our garbage cans for almost everything else. The City had a pretty incredible Composting Facility that was able to separate the organic and inorganic materials in our garbage without us worrying about it.

But in 2017, the City discovered that the Composting Facility had structural issues related to the high temperatures and moisture that are byproducts of composting. The roof of the structure was found to be unsafe a few years earlier than expected, and the facility had to be closed for the safety of its workers. Since then, most of our garbage has gone directly to our landfill, which is 80 km away near Riley, AB. That's a long way to truck garbage, and it's giving us a good opportunity to take a hard look at our waste.

Is the glass half empty, or half full? Depends on how you look at it. I like to think that the prohibitive cost of replacing the metal roof of a building the size of almost two and a half CFL football fields is giving Edmontonians a chance to consider the true costs of our garbage and how we can create less waste from the get go. We've done well in the past, but we can do so much better in the future!

On our MCR class tour of the Edmonton Waste Management Centre, we came across the graphic to the right. It tells us that most of Edmonton's waste comes from our need to have tidy yards. The fact is that sending grass clippings and yard waste to the dump is a huge contributor to our city's overall waste budget. If we could "leave it on our lawn" as the "Go Bagless" waste reduction promotions suggest, we save our environment a lot of wear and tear in terms of fossil fuel emissions required to haul all that good, compostable green stuff out to the EWMC, where it's put on long-haul trucks and sent to Riley for the time being. We'd also save on our own personal wear and tear if we stopped dragging our grasses to the garbage! See my old moodling about the other benefits of going bagless!

Misplaced recyclables and Eco Station items account for another almost 20% of our waste. If you're not sure what to do with an item, try the Waste Wise app (click here to find it.) It has plenty of helpful information, and a fun little game for the kids in us all.

All that's left is the almost 45% of garbage and food scraps. Within the next year, the City will be asking residents to adopt a new way of separating their garbage, effectively cutting it in half. We'll still have blue bags for recyclable items, but a black bin will take the 22% that is un-recyclable and non-reusable items, and a green bin will take the other 22% that are compostables, and both will be picked up by mechanical means so that our waste collectors won't get so worn out (the average collector lifts between 14 and 22 metric tonnes of waste per day, imagine!)

Besides protecting our collectors by separating our garbage at the source, we are all challenged to waste less and compost more. And that's important because it means that maybe we aren't buying excess stuff that only goes to waste, and we are returning to the earth the food scrap nutrients from natural resources that we can't eat, so that more good things can be grown.

I have a neighbour who loves to complain. His complaint is that he's going to have to separate his own waste and work harder for the same waste disposal service provided by the city. What he's missing is that we were spoiled by the City for a long time. His parents and grandparents had to do a lot more to take care of their own waste than we do now. By separating his own waste, he'll only be doing his natural part to contribute to a much better, less wasteful, waste service.

Soon we won't be sending as many reusable resources to the landfill or spending as much energy as it took the old Composting Facility to compost our waste. We won't be sending so many garbage trailers to Riley, and spending so much fossil fuel. And hopefully, as Edmontonians learn more about the new system, we'll find ways to reduce our waste overall. I'm excited by the idea that I won't have to throw out so many plastic garbage bags that take thousands of years to break down (I can put garbage directly in the bins without plastic bags!) And did you know that 1 in every 3 residences is already composting their own kitchen scraps and yard waste in one way or another? We're becoming more earth-friendly (and soil-friendly) all the time!

That, to me, is a glass-half-full-and-getting-fuller approach to life.

What Edmonton's new residential garbage set out will look like:
A black bin (for garbage), a green bin (and cute little kitchen compost bucket for compostables),
compostable brown paper bags for yard waste, and a good ol' blue bag for recycling.
Household hazardous waste (think paint, batteries, vehicle fluids and chemical cleaners),
electronics, and bulky items will continue to be accepted at Eco Stations.