waste

It’s Time to Think Hard About our Waste Systems

- Adam Clare

the suburbs

Modern capitalism encourages consumption at levels previously unimaginable which has led to an inconvenient byproduct: the globalization of waste. High levels of consumption means more waste in our system, and with the gift-giving holiday next month we’re going to see a lot of wasteful purchases. This year think about what gifts to give that don’t contribute to a landfill, indeed take some time to think about how your local municipality deals with waste created throughout the year. It turns out that in Canada we have a lot to learn form other places.

It’s time to rethink how we approach waste management in Canada beyond just saying reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Hird tells a story about a research project at Queen’s University, run by one of her grad students, Cassandra Kuyvenhoven, who tracked materials put into blue bins at Queen’s to see where they ended up. “While the system seemed functional and neat on the surface,” says Hird, “It certainly wasn’t that behind the scenes.” Kuyvenhoven found, for example, that when recyclable Styrofoam left Queen’s it was loaded onto trucks and taken to Toronto, where it was compacted chemically then trucked to Montreal where it was put on ships that took it to China, where it eventually ended up in landfill. “We might as well have landfilled it here,” says Hird, “and saved the tons of carbon that went into the atmosphere getting it to China.”

Electronics equipment made its slow way from the university’s loading docks to landfills in India and Mexico.

“When people think their stuff is being recycled, it clears their conscience, no matter what is actually happening beyond the blue box,” says Hird. “Our research shows that when their conscience is clear they tend to consume more than ever. Since Canadians started recycling in earnest maybe 30 years ago, consumerism in this country has done nothing but climb.”

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Quebec Business Turns Waste into Juice

- Adam Clare

beans
Juice Loop is a new company in Quebec that is taking food waste and turning it into juice and other products. This was isn’t what’s left on a plate from a restaurant, instead it comes from the supply chain inefficiencies present in how grocery stores run their operations. It’s a classic story of entrepreneurs seeing an opportunity to solve a problem, except these entrepreneurs want to make the world better while making money. They opened in the province of Quebec last year and have already cracked into the Ontario market.

In the food supply industry, the business model is partly based on speculation about the level of demand from groceries and anticipated sales, said Poitras-Saulnier. For example, a supplier could request 25 containers of fruit, but then fail to sell all of them, she explained.

“Sometimes they sell less — they could sell 20 containers. So there would be five left over the next week that are starting to get more ripe and almost ready to be eaten, which means that they wouldn’t last long enough in the distribution cycle and wind up being trashed.”

Juice Loop anticipates reusing 300 tons of fruits and vegetables by the end of this year and 525 tons in 2018. Its operations are designed to take care of all of the waste — even the leftover fruit pulp is reused to make organic pet food.

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Thanks to Delaney!

How Cities are Turning Food Waste Into…Food

- Adam Clare

fruit store
Cities have a problem with food: they waste a lot of it. The current food distribution setup encourages bulk deliveries via trucks which means that when that large amount of food goes bad – a lot of it does all at the same time. Governments have looked into this problem and are addressing it at the city level by finding novel ways to use the nearly-expired food. Some places are using food that can’t be sold in grocery stores for charity while others use it for entirely other reasons. It’s great to see food waste decrease a little more each year!

And giving food to hungry people—surprise surprise—makes society a lot better. One of the best examples is in the English former industrial town of Leeds, where food that would be thrown away from supermarkets goes to a big state school in a poor neighborhood. The school gets enough to feed all 600 pupils a nutritious breakfast and lunch for no extra cost to itself or to parents. Because the pupils aren’t hungry or coming down off sugar rushes, there’s less truancy, they behave better, and their exam scores have gone up.

But food banks and charities also end up with leftovers, so there’s been an explosion in organizations, like Les Confitures de Dominique in Bordeaux, that turn unwanted fruit and veg into jams, smoothies, chutneys, and soups. In fact, there’s a whole new industry of turning food waste into other food, like Toast Ale in London, which takes the unwanted bread ends that can’t be used for prepackaged sandwiches and turns them into beer.

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Thanks to Delaney!

A Plan for a Zero Waste Toronto

- Adam Clare

The Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA) has released a new report on how to get Toronto to be a zero waste city. The report covers a lot of material from food waste to hazardous waste, in total there are five sections with suggestions on how to improve Toronto’s waste management. Even if you’re not in Toronto you will be able to find ideas and suggestions for your own city’s waste issues.

Across the world, people, businesses and cities are adopting a vision of zero waste. A zero waste path for Toronto will protect the environment, benefit the community and support good green jobs and a strong local economy.

This report provides innovative ideas and concrete examples that can help as our city discusses what kind of future we want and what path we will choose to take on waste.

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Floating Dam to Capture Waste in the North Sea

- Adam Clare

The world’s oceans are polluted with massive amounts of waste plastics, so much so that we’ve had to name a grouping of plastic waste because it’s so large. There are many ways to reduce our use of plastics and our production of waste (hint: don’t buy so many things); we still need to deal with what has already been dumped into the oceans.

A new effort launching soon off the coast of The Netherlands will use a floating dam to catch floating plastics. The structure will allow animals though the mess while catching waste better than previous methods.

Plastic waste is a major threat to animals in the sea, who either choke on the material or suffer from related contaminants. But most ocean waste projects try to collect plastic waste with boats that end up inadvertently endangering ocean life. The revolutionary new dam, scheduled for deployment in the second quarter of 2016, will instead use currents to round up waves of garbage—bags, bottles, and other waste—while also letting sea creatures through. Passive, safe collection is the idea.

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