ยป Victoria’s Plan For: Waste Management
My friend Erin ran a community circle on the weekend. We started by brainstorming issues and then chunked them into logical categories (mostly ignoring the City’s topic areas). By consensus we decided to do a circle on waste management.
One reason we chose that is that I think everyone feels the City needs to be contintually prodded about curbside composting. (Oak Bay ran a “pilot project” for the Capital Region many years ago.) Organic material makes up 30% of the Capital Region’s landfill input. My goal was to keep a plastic bag ban off the table, because at less than 1% of landfill input I think it’s an insignificant step that distracts from real waste diversion strategies.
The visioning stage seemed kind of backward given that we had already narrowed in on a topic. The brainstorm-by-yourself-bring-it-back-to-the-group model worked very well for goals and strategies: we didn’t get any duplicates and by merging some ideas we got strong results.
The triple-bottom-line analysis and implementation planning felt like they were worth doing, but they didn’t change our strategies much. I wonder if the kind of people in our circle were the kind of people who do that thing in their heads?
Our three strategies:
- Composting and all recyclables pick-up for every household and in ubiquitous street bins (outstanding issue: cost!)
- Pay businesses and residences for composting and recycling, charge them a lot for garbage* (outstanding issue: will this create perverse incentives?)
- Establish a reusable container “library” with grocery stores, restaurants and other businesses – like the way that beer bottles are standardized and get reused rather than recycled (outstanding issue: implementation details)
* Based on Nudge, I think this could be accomplished just with information, but nobody else had read the book and I wasn’t able to convince them. 
The Regional Municipality of Waterloo has had curb-side pickup of composting (“green bins”) for a short while (one year, maybe) for houses. Just a few days ago I heard that they are now extending it to apartments, where apartment-dwellers will bring down their small containers of compostables and put them in bigger bins shared by the building, which will then be picked up by the garbage
menpersons.Overall, I’m quite happy with the program so far – they even take things that you aren’t supposed to compost at home, like meat and bones, and they pick it up on normal garbage days. In fact, the same truck picks up both the garbage and the green bin stuff, unlike recycling which is picked up by a different truck.
Waste management in general is good here – there is the green bin program, the blue box program accepts more kinds of things that most programs do (at least in Ontario), and on every garbage day we can set almost anything out to get picked up (appliances, furniture, the kitchen sink), and all this with no special usage fees. This started off as potentially useful information to Jared, but now it’s just bragging.
Don
28 Apr 10 at 11:52 am
When UVic started it’s recycling program after, of course, massive student protests, what it did was make recycling bins available and then just empty them all into the dumpsters with the normal garbage. Out of sight, out of mind.
@Don: Maybe the green bins and the garbage bags go to the same place when they die?
Jack
28 Apr 10 at 1:37 pm
@Jack: I call urban legend on that. Can you cite sources?
@Don: Using a single truck is surprisingly important for keeping recycling environmentally-positive… :-/
Jared
28 Apr 10 at 4:09 pm
I heard that from someone who implemented it back in the day. I don’t know if local bureaucratic conspiracies are well documented. The reasoning was that there was no recycling infrastructure — they had nothing to do with the collected containers.
Jack
29 Apr 10 at 12:17 pm
A lot of recycling depends on the value of the resulting commodity to pay for pick-up. When commodity prices crashed recently, recyclers started stockpiling recycables. Once they run out of room, it’s definitely going to the landfill.
Jared
29 Apr 10 at 12:38 pm
I read somewhere, maybe here, that there are fields of unprocessed plastic recyclables in Germany because their “market velocity”, to coin a phrase, is really low.
Buildings like the Taipei EcoARK may rectify that and increase the market price of the material, if plastic buildings catch on…
Jack
29 Apr 10 at 2:24 pm