If you put a can in a recycling bin on a downtown street, it’ll end up in a landfill. It’s a scenario that plays out to the tune of about one tonne per day.
All material collected from downtown street waste bins goes to the dump, explained Nectar Tampacopoulos, the city’s general manager in charge of environmental services.
“That is not our desired result,” he said of sending recyclable and organic material to landfill. “The reason for that is that it’s highly contaminated.”
By that he means materials aren’t properly sorted into the three waste streams – recyclables (blue), organics (green) and waste (grey).
Generally speaking, each truckload of collected material is spilled out and inspected for its contamination level.
If more than 19 per cent of material is put in the wrong bin, it’s deemed unsuitable for sorting and taken to the transfer station, then landfill. Any less than 19 per cent contamination and it goes to be manually sorted and disposed of through the three streams.
In the case of downtown bins, contamination beyond the threshold limit is assumed … and that’s always been the case.
“There are some challenges to downtown that you wouldn’t see elsewhere,” Tampacopoulos explained, noting public bins can be audited to determine sorting behaviours but it’s difficult to do follow-up education efforts when errors are found. “There isn’t a direct link to an address, so we’re not really sure which business might not be sorting property or which residents. And there’s a lot of visitors to the downtown that may be putting waste in the wrong bins.
“There are challenges at parks as well.”
About 35,000 tonnes of waste is collected each year throughout the city, with four per cent coming from the downtown. That equates to about 3.5 tonnes per day from the downtown.
The result, Tampacopoulos said, is about one tonne of downtown material that should be recycled is instead sent to the landfill.
“By diverting contaminated downtown loads to the transfer station directly both the organics and recycling facilities perform more efficiently,” Tampacopoulos noted in a follow-up email.
The contamination issue is nothing new for public bins, especially in the downtown – it’s an issue officials have always had to deal with, but there is hope for change in the future.
“We’re still doing outreach. We still want folks to sort,” Tampacopoulos said. “If we see those contamination numbers drop, then we will process it accordingly.”
City staff is in the midst of drafting an updated solid waste management master plan for council to consider in mid-2024, he added, noting that includes looking at prioritizing public space waste containers and implementing a dedicated collection strategy for the downtown.
“We’re confident we’re going to get to a place we can (divert from landfill), there’s just some specific challenges in that area,” said Tampacopoulos. “We continue to encourage three-stream sorting. We continue to work with the public, with the business owners.”
