Waste diversion attracts attention at city hall

SARA MINOGUE

Staff and council members at the City of Iqaluit showed renewed interest in recycling and composting after a citizen’s group made a presentation to council last Tuesday.

Five councillors expressed support for local solutions to a rapidly filling landfill after Lynn Peplinski, a director with Waste Matters Inc., spoke about the need to prolong the life of the landfill, and gave examples of what other communities had done to reduce garbage.

The presentation came shortly after Waste Matters sent a strongly worded letter to the mayor and councillors (and reprinted in Nunatsiaq News), asking them to hire a senior staff member to take control of solid waste issues; and re-examine the current recycling program in order to bring costs under control.

The letter took Ian Fremantle, the City’s senior administrative officer, by surprise, since three members of Waste Matters are also members of the city’s committee on solid waste management.

Peplinski has sat on the city’s committee since it began in January 2000, but she says the problem is that the city was not listening to the committee’s receommendations.

Three years ago, the committee, chaired by councillor Nancy Gillis, passed a resolution asking for a senior staffer dedicated to solid waste management.

Instead, the city hired a project officer last year.

Two months ago, the committee asked for numbers on what garbage costs, per ton. Nothing happened.

“Without any one person bringing forward ideas, that committee has nothing to respond to,” said Neida Gonzalez, a director of Waste Matters as well as a committee member since January.

The committee also wants to see a new solid waste management strategy document that the solid waste management committee has been requesting for several years.

“It’s incredibly important for this strategy document to get written,” Peplinski says. “The problem is that we don’t have someone in the city whose job it is, and who has the necessary level of experience to help guide us through the process.”

Waste Matters, formerly known as the Iqaluit Recycling Society, is the same group that led the call for the recycling program that began in December 2001.

The group recently re-branded itself in order to broaden the issues it hopes to address, and to break the stalemate at city hall.

Waste Matters maintains that recycling in Iqaluit is feasible, if there is someone hired to manage the many aspects of the program from planning cost-efficient truck routes to striking deals with airlines and shipping companies to take recyclables as ballast on southern hauls.

“Certainly when we launched the program we didn’t expect that they would run it as inefficiently as possible,” says Gonzalez.

Gonzalez is also concerned about some of the city staff’s activities. She says that a recent water license application for the landfill, submitted to the Nunavut Water Board, suggests that the city maintains a household hazardous waste program.

Municipal bylaws say the city will pick up hazardous waste, such as paint cans and batteries, four times a year. That was true in the past, but the last collection was in the fall of 2002.

“If they’re putting in a water license application that they have a program that they haven’t run in two years, then how accurate are their other numbers?” Gonzalez says.

The lobby group’s new tactics seem to be having an effect.

On Tuesday, city council committed to producing the strategy in October. Fremantle has previously argued that shipping recyclables South is too expensive.

At the meeting, however, he expressed support for an experimental composting program that as been going on all summer.

“I’m more optimistic than I was a couple of weeks ago,” Gonzalez says. “People seem to want to pull together and try to move things forward. Whether there’s enough momentum or capacity to do that, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

Recycling in the future?

For now, residents can still use the blue bags to recycle plastic, aluminum and tin.

In January, the City announced that residents could also recycle cardboard in their blue bags, but that announcement was made without any consultation with the solid waste management committee or the Iqaluit Recycling Society, which questions the efficiency of the idea.

Waste Matters is reluctant to clear up the matter until the future of Iqaluit’s recycling program is more certain.

Cost may be the deciding factor.

The program costs the city about $250,000 a year, even though the city had budgeted just $5,000. City staff made a bid to end the program this summer, but councillors said no.

Fremantle says the city is fortunate to have reserves with which to pay for the program, but two years of recycling costs have already removed $500,000 from the reserves, and this year’s costs will be just as high.

“If we do it for a fourth year, then we’ve spent a million dollars out of reserves, and something’s got to be dropped [out of the capital plan].”

In the two years that recyclables have been shipped South, Fremantle says the city earned only about $5,000 or $6,000 back from selling the material.

“We need to find a better way of doing this. Composting at the moment seems to be a more realistic approach,” Fremantle says.

Fremantle also says that the city is still not addressing the real problem: finding a new landfill site.

“Whether we divert waste or not, it will only give us another three or four year lifespan. At the same time, we’ve got to reduce the amount of waste we’re putting in the landfill so that whatever we come up with will last longer.”