Park protection should be job one for the city when it comes to the environment, say city residents.
The City of St. Albert published the results of its first-ever Community Environmental Survey Friday. The survey had Banister Research make 7,000 phone calls last April to ask 801 people about the city’s waste programs and the goals listed in its Environmental Master Plan.
When asked about the importance of the eight goals in the plan, the survey found that the most important one was the protection of trees, parks and natural areas, with some 94 per cent of respondents ranking it as important or very important. Protecting the Sturgeon River came second with 90 per cent, with maintaining air quality placing third with 89 per cent.
That’s a big change from when the plan was made in 2009, said city community sustainability manager Leah Kongsrude, where an informal survey pegged waste reduction and climate change as the top goals. “It’s definitely jumped up the list from last time,” she said of parks and trees.
The survey found that protecting the Sturgeon had the highest importance and lowest satisfaction rating of all the environmental plan’s goals, suggesting that it was the one most in need of improvement.
Last year’s release of the State of the Sturgeon River Watershed Report will build the foundation for such improvements, Kongsrude said, while plans to put eight new grit interceptors onto the city’s stormwater pipes should further help the river.
“The watershed’s just not in the City of St. Albert,” Kongsrude continued. The city planned to meet this week with members of the North Saskatchewan Watershed Alliance to draw up terms of reference for a renewed Sturgeon River stewardship group – one that would involve all communities in the watershed. She hoped to have this group up and running before the end of the year.
The city will use this survey to shape its review of the environmental master plan, Kongsrude said. It also plans to hold focus groups this fall to come up with new ideas on how to reach the plan’s goals.
The survey is considered accurate to within 3.4 percentage points 19 times out of 20. Results can be found at www.stalbert.ca/environmental-master-plan.
St. Albert is king of the capital region hill when it comes to waste reduction, says a new report, but it and its neighbours have a lot of work to do when it comes to construction waste.
St. Albert council accepted part one of the Alberta Capital Region Integrated Waste Management plan after it was presented to them Monday.
The Capital Region Waste Minimization Advisory Committee (of which St. Albert is a member) commissioned this report last year to find out how regional co-operation could help reduce waste. The committee aims to divert 80 per cent of the Edmonton region’s trash from the landfill by 2032.
There’s a lot of duplication in the region when it comes to waste reduction, said Christian Benson, who presented the report to council as the city’s solid waste programs co-ordinator, and cities can save money and improve services through co-operation. St. Albert now uses Edmonton’s bag-ripper to compost leaf waste instead of land-filling it, for example.
The report found that St. Albert kept about 65.5 per cent of its waste out of the landfill through recycling and composting – the highest diversion rate in the region.
But it also found that the region would miss its 2032 goal without more reductions in the institutional and construction/demolition sectors. Those sectors make up about 67 per cent of Alberta’s waste, the report found.
The report makes a slew of recommendations, such as raising landfill fees and banning certain materials from landfills. It called on committee members to lobby for stricter regulations on construction and demolition waste, and to expand construction waste sorting facilities at all landfills. They should also create a “toolkit” to give to contractors telling them how they can recycle more waste.
Edmonton has a great sorting facility for construction waste, Benson said, and could reduce waste and save companies money if it were better used. “I think we just have to do a better job of promoting what’s available.”
The report is available on the St. Albert city website in the minutes for the June 15 meeting.
