By Kevin Ma
Rubber boots. Carpet. Maggots. Used electronic sex toys.
You never know what you'll find in the trash in Morinville. Last week, the town called in some experts to find out.
Three members of the Recycling Council of Alberta teamed up with Morinville public works staff on July 19 and 20 to perform what was likely the town's first professional trash audit.
Weight reports from the Roseridge Landfill have shown that Morinville is still tossing a high volume of trash despite introducing curbside recycling and composting, said town public works director Claude Valcourt. That made his department suspect that the town was not doing the best it could at waste diversion.
"I wanted to have another unbiased look at what is happening in the streets in terms of garbage," he said, so he called up the Recycling Council of Alberta to do a trash audit.
The audit took place in the otherwise empty Ray McDonald arena. Dressed in gloves, white Tyvek suits, safety goggles, and dust masks, auditors Isabella Luu, Angie Rice, and Leanne Moreira spent over 16 hours rummaging through trash bags intercepted from 50 random Morinville homes.
The council does these audits regularly to help communities maximize waste diversion, said Moreira, the group's outreach co-ordinator. This one cost about $5,500.
Most audits see three people sorting through 20 homes of trash per day for a week, Moreira said. They chose to scale this one back to 50 since the town only collects trash twice a week. Homes were picked to reflect a variety of neighbourhoods, street types, and income levels.
The team carefully cut open each bag of rotting debris and sorted it into 18 categories of waste, including electronics, household hazardous, paper (recyclable and not), beverage containers, and construction and demolition waste. Each category was weighed for later analysis before being sent to the dump.
There was surprisingly little mess involved, as the team was fastidious when it came to sorting. There was a definite miasma of rot and decay around the sorting table, though.
"You make the best of it, and you have a lot of fun with whatever you find," Moreira said, when asked how they can withstand a week's worth of this work.
The team encountered used tissues, rubber boots, wriggling maggots, and a few dead mice during its audit. They even found a bag full of used electronic sex toys and torn-up family photos.
"I doubt they're recyclable," Moreira said of the sex toys (as they were a diverse mix of materials), so they likely belonged in the trash.
The team found a lot of food waste in the trash, which suggests that the town is not making full use of its curbside organics program, Moreira said. There was also a fair amount of construction and demolition waste and deposit-refundable beverage containers, none of which should end up in the trash.
The Gazette's trash audit of Morinville earlier this year found similar results. That 11 home audit found that just 23 per cent of the town's waste had been properly recycled or composted, and that some 74 per cent could have been diverted from the landfill with full use of the town's waste program.
These initial results suggest that the town may want to step up its education efforts, especially about its organics program, Moreira said.
"They may want to tell people that all the organics can go in that (yard waste) bin even though it says 'yard waste.'"
Valcourt said he would have the results of the audit by mid-August and report on it to council by September.
