Detritus makes for trash talk at city’s waste-transfer depot
Some jokes, even throwaway lines, fall flat at the City of Vancouver’s transfer station.
“This place is a dump,” for instance, will be met with a look that says “Really?”
Still, if you want, Amrit Pangli can trash-talk with the best.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “My friends love to trash-talk me.”
Pangli is superintendent at the Vancouver transfer station, where what we discard is separated before being taken to the landfill in Delta, compost sites and recycling stations.
The words we associate with that stuff usually have negative connotations.
We talk about garbage time in basketball games, lament a waste of time, call heroin junk, rubbish ideas we see no value in.
Not surprisingly, then, Pangli never dreamed she would become so passionate about garbage.
“Honestly, even four years ago (when she was hired by the city) if you had asked me would I be in this position, I would not have said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s going to be me in four years, the superintendent of the transfer station.’ ”
She is also an anomaly at the station, a woman with a staff of 47 men, all but perhaps four or five of whom are older than the 27-year-old.
“Some of them worked here 30 years and never had to speak to a woman at work before,” she said. “Certainly not one in my position.”
The transfer station in south Vancouver is impressive in its organization and efficiency.
A concrete pit, roughly the size of an Olympic pool and ranging in depth from 27 feet to five feet at the shallow end, is where garbage is dumped after being separated from the recyclables. It’s then bulldozed into 60-foot tractor-trailers and hauled to the Delta landfill — between 550 and 600 tonnes of it each day.
That’s on top of 250 tonnes of food scraps a day and 50 mattresses daily (over the 363 days a year the station is open, that’s 18,150 mattresses a year).
The weekly goal is to have the pit emptied by Sunday evenings.
There are among us a generation that threw out everything: TV sets, used motor oil, uneaten food, well, you name it. Nothing was recycled.
It’s constantly evolving. Mattresses began being recycled in 2008, now Styrofoam is recyclable, and three weeks ago the City of Vancouver started a program to recycle bicycles.
In other words, what once was met with incredulous stares — “You want me to what? To separate my trash?” — is now the norm, at least among Pangli’s peers and friends.
So while there’s more waste than ever, it gets separated — stuffed animals here, speakers the size of travel trunks and big-screen TVs the size of baby grands there — and much less of it, well, goes to waste.
Pangli said she works with a good, tight-knit crew and it’s rewarding to see newer employees come in and discover a passion for their work.
“Because no one, when they’re five or six years old, says I’m going to work in a garbage facility when I grow up. But they come here and they love it.”