Morinville has a waste problem. It's not obvious – there are no huge piles of garbage on the curb – but there are red flags everywhere if you look at the data.
Morinville has a waste problem.
It's not obvious – there are no huge piles of garbage on the curb – but there are red flags everywhere if you look at the data.
Town public works manager Claude Valcourt did so last January, and warned town council that residents were still sending a significant amount of trash to the dump despite recent improvements to their waste diversion programs.
Was Morinville being wasteful?
I decided to find out. Last Feb. 26, I teamed up with Morinville Community High School (MCHS) teacher Neil Korotash and his student scientists to conduct the town's first-ever waste audit.
And just as I suspected, once we started digging through the town's garbage, we found some nasty surprises.
Waste basics
A waste audit is a review of all the material that goes into and out of an organization, said Christina Seidel, executive director of the Recycling Council of Alberta. It's meant to find ways to improve waste diversion.
Morinville has never done a formal waste audit, said Donald Fairweather, operations manager for public works. The best estimate of its diversion rate (a measure of the amount of trash it diverts from the landfill) comes from a 2013 report by the Capital Region Waste Minimization Advisory Committee, which pegged it at 27.6 per cent (about 28 bags of waste recycled or composted for every 72 landfilled). That's far below the Edmonton regional average of 49 and way behind St. Albert's 66.
Morinville has had curbside collection of yard waste and recycling since 2009, and introduced curbside organics (kitchen and yard) in mid-2014. It collects recycling and trash (non-compostable, non-recyclable waste) weekly, and gathers organics weekly from May to October and monthly otherwise.
Each resident pays a flat rate for waste collection and can drop off up 1,000 kg of junk to the Roseridge landfill a year for free, said Gerald Duffy, manager of Roseridge (Morinville and St. Albert's dump).
Waste wastes money. The more junk Morinville sends to the dump, the more it has to spend expanding that dump, Duffy said.
“The more we can divert away from landfilling, the better it is for the ratepayer.”
It also harms the environment. If you landfill 10 tonnes of food, it produces about eight tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, reports the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Waste Reduction Model (WARM) calculator – equivalent to burning about 19 barrels of oil.
The horror! The horror!
I had the MCHS team collect one week's worth of waste from 11 random Morinville homes for our audit. The donors were told not to do anything special with their waste, just to sort it as they would normally and set it aside for our team.
Our 10 student volunteers eagerly piled the garbage bags in front of the school. Gloves, scales and lab-coats ready, they were pumped to do science. After some last minute instructions, I set them loose, and they tore open the bags.
That's when the true horror of the task before them hit them like ... well, like a pile of stinking, wet, week-old garbage.
“Eww!” they said.
“Nooo!”
“That's nasty!”
There was rotting rice. Blackened banana peels. Bloody sanitary pads. Used diapers. All of it mushed together into a dripping, miasmic mess.
“I am literally digging through cat poo right now!” groaned one student.
But the team persevered, picking through the bags and sorting the waste. School principal Todd Eistetter even pulled on a pair of gloves to help out.
“You know, I don't think I'll have any lunch today,” he muttered, after a few minutes of muck-work.
Our team soon realized that, based on our sample, town residents were not doing a good job of diverting waste. Just one donor had bothered to sort organic waste from trash, and they hadn't even used the organics cart to do it.
Korotash said four of the donors he spoke with told him the town did not collect organics in the winter, and didn't believe him when he told them it did.
“It was a bit of a discovery.”
The team found about three kilograms of clothes and about two kg of electronic and household hazardous waste in our sample – materials that should have gone to charity or a specialized disposal site instead of the garbage.
They also found valuable pop bottles and tetra-packs – about 70 cents worth – which they liberated for their school.
And the food! The team found sealed granola bars, a bag of fresh apples, a Rubbermaid container of cherry tomatoes, and even an unopened spinach-dip-and-bread meal in the trash, all ready to eat.
“Croissant, anyone?” asked Korotash, as he held up a flawless, yet discarded, pastry.
This was food that could have done much good in the hands of the hungry. Instead, it would cause environmental and economic harm in the dump.
The verdict
Our donors put out just 2.8 kg of material for composting and 31.4 kg for recycling. The rest of their waste – some 113 kg – had been set out as trash. This suggests a town-wide waste diversion rate of about 23 per cent.
“That's definitely low,” Seidel said, when shown these results – there are communities out there with waste programs like Morinville's that are getting close to 70 per cent diversion.
Waste collection data for 2014 to 2015 provided by Duffy provides a clue as to why our rate was so low. That data shows that while contractors collected plenty of organics in the spring and summer, they got very little in the fall and none in January through March.
These facts, combined with our results and Korotash's chats with our donors, strongly suggest that town residents are making little to no use of their organics bins in wintertime, either through choice or ignorance.
Of the 113 kg our donors set out as trash, we estimated that about 13 per cent was recyclable and 52 per cent compostable. (This estimate and the ones in the next few paragraphs may be inaccurate as we forgot to weigh a 20 kg bag of sorted waste in our audit. While we're pretty sure it was organic waste and categorized it as such, we might be wrong.)
This suggests that the town could have diverted up to 74 per cent of its trash under ideal circumstances.
Data from Duffy suggests that Morinville tossed some 3,362 tonnes of residential trash last year. If that trash was exactly like the trash we found in our audit, it would have contained some 1,764 tonnes of mixed organics and 442 tonnes of mixed recyclables – enough to fill about five Olympic swimming pools or to bury a Canadian football field 1.5 metres deep, information from Seidel suggests.
The WARM calculator suggests that this non-diverted waste created about 710 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – equivalent to burning about 1,700 barrels of oil. Had it been diverted, the town would have prevented some 2,362 tonnes of emissions – that's like planting about 60,600 trees!
Cleaning up
Morinville has a comprehensive waste diversion program with everything it needs to get to about 60 per cent diversion, Seidel said. So why hasn't it?
“It's obvious that awareness and education is what's missing,” she said.
“Municipalities think that all they have to to do is put out some bins and everything will be great. That's not the way it works. People need to be prompted to participate,” she said, and repeatedly.
Seidel said the town should look at St. Albert and Strathcona County for examples of effective waste education. St. Albert has an extensive waste-reduction website, for example, a full-time solid waste programs co-ordinator and a waste-reduction mascot.
The town might also be discouraging people from using the organics bin in the winter with its collection schedule, Fairweather said – why have your organics rot in the bin for a month when you can have them hauled off as trash in a week?
“The dollar counts, sometimes,” he added – if residents had the option to subscribe to a smaller, cheaper waste container (as St. Albert residents do), they would have an incentive to recycle and compost more.
I personally suspect the ability of residents to dump 1,000 kg of waste at Roseridge a year for free is also discouraging waste reduction. Duffy's data shows that about 40 per cent of the town's household trash in 2015 was hauled to the dump by residents, implying that many residents are using this freebie.
The results of our trash audit strongly suggest that there's much Morinville could do to make less waste. But waste audits are snapshots in time, and our results may have differed had we done this one under other circumstances.
Another audit would give the town a clearer picture of its waste situation. Fairweather said town staffers hope to do such an audit in the near future.
Morinville may have a waste problem, but if it gets its hands dirty like our team and gets serious about waste reduction, it can solve it.
Download the compete set of data collected in .xlsx format
here.
Want the details?
Check the online version of this story for a spreadsheet containing most of the calculations used for this story.
