Minimizing waste is key for climate action in Sask.
Regina, Saskatoon have reduced amount going to landfill, but it’s only a beginning
Sign says: “No time to waste”
“Buy less. Use more stuff for longer.”
Teal Clarke, then six years old, read this advice aloud at the March 15 climate strike in Regina.
All told, she and twin sister Rowan, now seven, shared 17 tips for stopping climate change.
“If we all do our part, we will make a difference, not only for animals, but it’s also for us too,” Teal said at the time.
Many of the girls’ ideas boiled down to “reduce,” and they aren’t new. For decades, students have learned about the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. There’s a reason reduce comes first, says Kelvin Ng, a U of R engineering professor. Minimizing waste solves the problem at the start, he notes.
Canadians in 2016 sent 688 kilograms of waste per capita per year to the landfill, according to Statistics Canada.
“If you’re living in Saskatchewan, we actually produce more waste compared to an average Canadian,” added Ng, who has extensively studied waste management in Canada.
As solid waste decomposes, it produces carbon dioxide and methane.
Methane is about 25 times more potent than CO2 over a century.
Decomposing also produces leachate, liquid waste that contaminates groundwater.
Waste management has been a key focus for the cities of Regina and Saskatoon, which have each aimed to drastically reduce landfill waste — Regina by 65 per cent come 2020, and Saskatoon by 70 per cent come 2023.
They are making reductions — Regina’s 2018 trashload of 198,000 tonnes was an 18-per-cent decrease from 2012, the last year before curbside recycling was implemented.
But neither city is even close to meeting its target, which is one reason both are looking to citywide curbside composting programs by 2023. (Saskatoon currently has a subscription green cart service.)
In Regina, half of all landfill trash is food and yard waste; in Saskatoon, it’s 32 per cent.
Even six years into curbside recycling, Reginans are still mistaking recyclables for trash — and vice versa. (In 2016, those mistakes included attempted recycling of Christmas lights, kitchen sinks and deer carcasses.)
Both cities have endeavoured to educate citizens about what is recyclable, to cut down on landfill waste. In Regina, the Cartsmart Team has randomly checked household bins to inform people of common waste management mistakes.
Organizations like the Saskatchewan Waste Reduction Council, a non-profit established in 1990, also promote information on recycling and composting. Source reduction and organic waste are two of its three priority focuses.
Reducing waste before it hits the landfill is important not only for reducing trash loads: “If you spend $100 on solid waste management, about half of the money actually goes to transportation of the waste” in North America, said Ng. There are CO2 emissions tied to all those trucks hauling our waste.
Recycling is a tricky business. It is business, which means weighing profit and loss, supply and demand.
“The majority of the time,” socalled recyclable materials end up in a landfill, said Ng.
According to the federal government, less than 10-per-cent of plastic that’s used in Canada gets recycled.
“If a particular product costs too much (to recycle), a community might opt not to have that product in its program,” SWRC executive director Joanne Fedyk said in 2017.
That’s also why certain items are recyclable in one city but not another.
Regina’s recyclables (handled by Emterra Environmental under a contract with the city) were determined by a landfill audit of the most common items people trashed. Plastic bags weren’t on the list; neither were disposable coffee cups.
In Saskatoon, plastic bags were once accepted for recycling; coffee cups will be deemed trash come Jan. 1.
Recycling depends on facilities’ capabilities and the ability to find a buyer: Recyclable materials are commodities, to be sold, processed and manufactured into a new item.
In 2018, Canada lost a buyer when China ceased accepting 24 types of plastic and paper products from Canada. Malaysia followed suit this year.
“People were shipping them straight up garbage (and) calling it recycling,” Fedyk said in May. “Or they were shipping them a lot of materials that were mixed together that were difficult to do anything with.”
As a result, Calgary and Airdrie this summer opted to bury in landfills 19 months’ worth of clamshell plastic the cities had collected for recycling, when they couldn’t find a buyer.
Ng suggested “the majority of the industrial powers, they will actually want to look at the plastic from the very beginning ” — as in, reduce consumption. Here, government regulations and incentives could play a role.
In June, the federal government announced a ban on single-use plastics as early as 2021, including straws, plastic bags, plates, cutlery and stir sticks.
“We have a responsibility to work with our partners to reduce plastic pollution, protect the environment, and create jobs and grow our economy,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Already, there are businesses leading the charge, although they may not be the businesses you’d expect: Even at hyper-local sources, like the Regina Farmers’ Market and The Local Market, you’re hard pressed to find non-plasticwrapped groceries.
The chain of Bulk Barn stores allows customers to bring reusable containers to fill with grocery items, rather than selling in plastic packaging.
In Saskatoon, independently-owned Bulk Basket is following that lead: “People are looking to be plastic free and we are happy to help them,” said owner Nag Arajan.
A local business in Regina, Mortise & Tenon general store allows the same for shampoo, conditioner, laundry detergent and more. It also sells reusable produce bags, straws and other items, because “if everyone made small changes now, it would make a huge difference overall,” said store co-owner Dani Hackel.
North Hunter dreams of a zero-waste store.
A 21-year-old who’s active in the climate strikes, she says personal choices add up, and it’s important to make sustainable options easy for consumers and citizens.
She refers to Precious Plastic, an organization providing free blueprints for machines to reuse plastic, so people can create usable products in their communities — like compost bins, urban garden beds and park benches.
We don’t have to ship plastic recyclables overseas, she argues.
On a smaller scale of products, Jeremy Lang is using recycled plastic and flax to create phone cases and other accessories at Pela, formerly based in his hometown of Saskatoon.
“I think this is more like a cultural shift,” said Ng. “It takes time to educate people that it’s actually better for us to actually reuse the material rather than to extract the new materials.”