City’s waste management strains under trash surge
The City of Ottawa is urging residents to alter their garbage-disposal habits as more trash is being collected during the COVID-19 pandemic while people hunker down at home.
The city, for now, isn’t releasing data on the amount of residential trash that has been loaded into garbage trucks in recent weeks.
But there’s no doubt: commuters-turned-homebodies are pumping more garbage into the municipal waste system, which is mostly fed by people in homes.
The city owns the municipal dump on Trail Road and any garbage that can’t be recycled or used for compost is tipped into the landfill.
Most industrial, commercial and institutional waste, like the garbage accumulated by office buildings and other businesses that produce large amounts of waste, is up to the private sector to manage.
Since the city collects garbage from the curbside of about 294,000 homes and about 1,700 multi-residential properties each week, there’s potential for a significant increase in residential trash.
Shelley McDonald, the city’s director of solid waste service, said staff are finalizing the information before releasing the data during a technical briefing on the work being done to write a new solid waste master plan. The briefing is expected in the coming weeks, McDonald said.
While McDonald confirmed there has been an increase in the amount of garbage collected since the physical distancing rules, she said it’s too early to determine what kind of impact the extra garbage will have on the lifespan of the municipal dump.
The dump also accepts trash from businesses, but McDonald said no commercial waste is currently being accepted.
The city regularly crunches projections on the year in which the municipal dump will reach capacity. The latest estimate has the dump closing around 2041, but it ultimately depends on people’s recycling habits.
There has also been a slight increase to registrations for special diaper and incontinence product pickups between March 1 and April 14, compared to the same period in 2019.
The COVID-era diversion rate — the amount of curbside garbage going to the recycling and organics-processing plants instead of the dump — also wasn’t available this week. In pre-COVID -19 times, Ottawa residents were typically throwing 25 per cent of blue-bin material and 21 per cent of black-bin material into the garbage, according to city data. Only about 50 per cent of residents use their green bins.
The city is urging people to alter their garbage-disposal habits during the pandemic.
Don’t put garbage in bins that’s not first placed in bags, the city says, and make sure tissues and napkins are in bags before they go into the green bin.
While it might seem like the perfect time to get some spring cleaning done, the city says now is not the time to unload unwanted furniture to the curb on garbage days, since it wants collectors to focus on clearing run-of-the-mill residential waste while respecting the physical distancing requirement.
Also on the topic of spring cleaning, the city is asking people to only place two or three bags of leaf and yard waste to the curb each week.
Household waste depots are on hold, so residents will have to keep the material until the dropoff events resume.
The city has also announced that the spring giveaway weekend, on which residents are encouraged to put unwanted items to the curbs for others to reclaim, won’t happen in June as previously scheduled.
Another important update on the city’s garbage program is expected after the one-year anniversary of allowing plastics in the green bin passes.
The city started allowing plastic bags in the green bin on July 2, 2019, as a way to settle a contract dispute with organics processor Renewi (formerly Orgaworld) and get more people using their green bins.