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.

Simple Suggestion #272... Keep on recycling

Two weeks ago, at conference for members of a charitable organization I volunteer with, I was stunned to hear a facilitator announce, "The City of Edmonton is no longer recycling." As if the end of recycling was a done deal.

WHAT?

As a Master Composter Recycler, I quickly jumped in to try to set the record straight. Yes, the City of Edmonton's Waste Management Branch is facing some challenges, but recycling continues! (I don't think the facilitator read the entire newspaper article on which she was basing her statement.)

The Waste Management Branch, the City's utility committee, and City Council are working to come up with improvements in the way our waste is handled. One idea is to get residents to do more sorting of their own waste -- by providing them with different bins for separating organics from plastics, metals, glass, and paper, so that different items aren't contaminated by being squished together in the trucks that haul them to the recycling facility. Another idea is to refuse to pick up yard waste like grass clippings (because it's actually much smarter to leave them on the lawn rather than spend fossil fuels trucking them around). And I'm sure there are many other options being discussed.

The City of Edmonton's Waste Management has been in the news lately because it hasn't lived up to its very ambitious plan to divert 90% of residential waste from our landfill, but we can't let that stop us from recycling all that we can. And along with recycling, we can also do our best to reduce waste at the source by buying items with less packaging, by taking simple steps to reduce single-use items in our lives (for example, by using travel mugs, cloth shopping bags, mesh produce bags, and I hope you can name a dozen other possibilities), and by learning to compost our kitchen scraps and yard waste.

Even if you don't live in the Edmonton area, we have to keep on reducing our impact on this planet, and the best way is simply to use fewer resources in the first place, opt out of consumerism wherever possible, share our resources, and recycle what's left over from our daily lives however possible.

It's a huge challenge, and it's a bandwagon that we all need to jump on and stay on. Don't let anyone tell you to give up on recycling. Do your own research on methods if need be, and keep on recycling!

A critical time for reducing waste

Waste reduction week 2017 (October 16-22) was just a few weeks ago, and since then, city managers have discovered that part of our  Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence is having some structural problems. The snowfall on the aging roof of the Composting Facility's 18-year-old aeration hall, a building large enough to hold 2.3 CFL-sized football fields, has rendered the building unsafe.

This means that all of the city's waste, including our organic compostable kitchen scraps, now must be trucked 85 km down the road to the landfill at Ryley, AB, until a solution can be found. In the meantime, Edmontonians need to do everything we can to reduce our waste. Recyclable materials will still be recycled -- it's the things that can't be recycled that we should give more consideration.

Do you know where your garbage goes? How many fossil fuel emissions are involved in getting it to its destination? If you've never given the idea of composting a thought, now's the time to do it. If there's a corner of your yard where you can put a compost bin that you can fill with organic kitchen waste (plant matter, vegetable peelings, fruit cores, coffee grounds, tea leaves, etc.) over the winter, now's the time to do it. If you'd rather start composting in the spring, compostable waste can be frozen in an outdoor plastic garbage can until things warm up. The Compost' S cool website has different ideas to help homeowners reduce the compostable part of their garbage, and our libraries have many resources about composting and recycling ideas.

As for the non-compostable stuff, in Edmonton we need to make sure that we're making full use of our blue bags for recycling, Eco-Stations for electronics, chemical waste and large items, the Reuse Directory -- which lists charity organizations that accept reusable items -- and Edmonton's own ReUse Centre. Other cities and towns have their own ways of reducing the tonnage that goes to landfill -- for many Canadians it's just a matter of doing a little research and jumping on board with the good planning that's already in place.

But probably the most important thing we can do is question ourselves every time we are about to dispose of something. We need to ask ourselves: Is this really garbage? Is it still usable in any way? Can it be repaired? Would someone else be able to use it? Should I throw it away or find a different way to get rid of it?

And we need to question ourselves every time we go shopping, whether it be for groceries or other household needs. Again we can ask ourselves: Do I really need this right now? Can I wait a little longer for it? Is there a way to buy it without so much packaging? and other questions, depending on the item...

Now is a critical time for reducing waste in our city, but really every day should be. It's simply good practice to keep waste reduction in mind at all times because all of the "leftovers" in our lives will have to go somewhere else eventually, even once this problem with the Compost Facility is fixed. It's always better if our things can be passed on, composted, or recycled rather than ending up in a landfill 85 km away!

Are you waste wise?

What do you do with empty pizza boxes? Shredded paper? Old VHS video tapes? Left over school supplies? The ugly, non-working lamp that Aunt Calliope left you in her will in the futile hope that you would love and repair it?

As a proud City of Edmonton Master Composter/Recycler, I'm pleased to tell you that there's an app for that... Waste Wise is the City's new phone and computer application that allows you to easily look up an item that you're not sure how to properly dispose of.  Click on the link above and scroll down to the search box. It will tell you that the pizza box can go in your blue bag for recycling, shredded paper goes into a garbage bag so it can be composted in the Waste Management Branch's huge composting facility, and VHS tapes are best taken to an Ecostation so that black magnetic tape from their sure-to-be-broken-in-the-garbage-compactor cassettes don't tie up recycling or composting equipment and cause system shut downs. And it's amazing the number of ordinary things like leftover school supplies that can be recycled or reused through Edmonton's Reuse Centre.

The app will even tell you when your garbage collection day is and send reminders to your phone (I hate it when I forget, but I don't have a phone, so I live with it). And the Waste Wise page also has an interesting garbage sorting game for kids (or adults -- I'll admit to enjoying building my very own vitual playground).

Unfortunately, the app still doesn't know what to do with ex-boyfriends or Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton... I keep hoping the Waste Wise webmaster will come up with some smart comebacks for those "items," like SIRI does when you say, "I love you."  I won't hold my breath on that one, as I'm sure the Waste Wise folks already have their hands full.

As for Aunt Calliope's ugly lamp... well, if it's fixable, it might be worth something at the Antiques Road Show. Or not. And don't forget that one person's trash is another's treasure. Sometimes if you set it out where your trash is collected, someone can anonymously claim it for their own. Or not. You just never know about these things!