City residents will have a chance to set the course of St. Albert’s environment this month as the city’s environmental master plan comes up for debate.
The City of St. Albert is holding two public workshops on its environmental master plan this Nov. 19 and 21. The workshops are meant to give residents a chance to set the city’s environmental goals for the next five years.
A lot has changed since the plan passed in 2009, said city environmental co-ordinator Meghan Myers. The city’s blown past its waste reduction goal of 65 per cent waste diversion by 2020, for example, and surpassed its goals for pesticide use reduction.
The recent community environment survey found that the city’s top environmental priorities should be forests, parks and protecting the Sturgeon River, Myers said. Hazardous waste management, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be the priority it once was.
The city has therefore proposed to take pesticide reduction off the master plan’s list of goals, Myers said.
“We don’t want to lose those targets,” she added, so they plan to downgrade these targets to more of a bullet point under the watershed protection section.
“It’s not so much of a large focus right now.”
Staff also propose to raise the city’s waste reduction targets to 75 per cent waste diversion and 105 kilograms of trash per person per year by 2020. The city currently sits at 67 per cent diversion and 112 kilograms per head per year.
“It’ll take some work, but it’s definitely something that’s achievable in the next five years,” Myers said.
No big changes have been proposed for the city’s air quality goals, Myers said, as the city is still waiting on its air quality monitoring station to get some baseline data.
A city committee has picked three potential sites for the station, and will review them with Alberta Environment later this month. Expect an open house on any proposed home for the station early next year, Myers said.
The environmental advisory committee has proposed to add a new goal to the master plan to “foster community environmental stewardship,” Myers said, one that would encourage residents to get involved in environmental programs.
The workshops will be a cafĂ©-style conversation with background briefings and discussions on the plan’s goals, Myers said. Residents will be asked to talk about what they want changed and what priorities the city should set in the plan.
Myers hopes to get about 25 residents per session – she already has about 12 per session signed up. The city would also have an online survey later this month for anyone who misses the sessions. The revised plan would go before council in March.
The sessions run from 7 to 9 p.m. in the east boardroom of St. Albert Place. Call Myers at 780-459-1735 or email her at [email protected] to register.
Snow isn’t as big of a problem for solar power in the Edmonton region as once thought, suggests a new study by a local solar power group.
The Solar Energy Society of Alberta is holding a free talk next Wednesday on how to get the most out of a solar panel in Alberta.
The talk draws on data from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology’s test array, said talk host Gordon Howell of Howell-Mayhew Engineering, which has been in operation for about a year and a half. It features six pairs of panels, each of which is set at a different angle and monitored in real time. Researchers kept half the panels clear of snow and left the other half covered to see how snow affected their output.
Howell said he had thought snow cover would cut a panel’s output by 10 to 14 per cent, but the NAIT experiment found that the reduction was just six per cent.
“I’m a bit surprised that it’s so low,” he said.
This was based on a single winter, he cautioned, and snow depth does vary year to year. Still, it suggests that the average homeowner with a 24-panel array could save $40 a year by keeping it snow-free.
“I am never going to ask somebody to go onto (his or her) roof to clear snow,” he added, but it might be worth it to clear the panels from the ground.
The talk will also discuss the best angle at which to set your solar panels, how to track your system’s performance and the economics of solar.
The talk is in the CN Theatre (Room 5-142) at MacEwan University this Nov. 13 at 7 p.m. Visit solaralberta.ca for details.
