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Clearing the air on recycling

Sometimes I get a bit frustrated with the press. Reading Saturday’s editorial ( St. Albert Gazette , Jan. 19) is an example. Although not overly negative or incorrect, the message is aimed in the wrong direction.

Sometimes I get a bit frustrated with the press. Reading Saturday’s editorial (St. Albert Gazette, Jan. 19) is an example. Although not overly negative or incorrect, the message is aimed in the wrong direction.

First off, a few inaccuracies:

• The city is not cracking down on materials allowed in the blue bag program. The changes are globally driven and every municipality is facing this.

• There has been no departure from St. Albert’s well-established commitment to the environment. I find this very offensive. The environment is one of our top priorities as laid out in our strategic plan. St. Albert, your mayor and council are leading the conversation on the waste crisis.

• The editorial stated that focusing on plastic bags is narrow and myopic, which is why the city is forming a single-use item reduction strategy not a single-use bag strategy. A simple call or fact check would have clarified this. And of course, we are focusing on the whole hierarchy of the waste triangle.

• And finally, the sentence about the city leaders taking off their blinders angered me to no end. I spent the summer educating and preparing residents for these changes. We have an enviable waste diversion program and we are focusing on all 5Rs, coming up with new plans and practices to ensure our commitment is constant and unwavering.

There are not just 3Rs in the aim to zero waste, there are five and the order is important. First and most important is Reduce; then we need to Reuse; then we need to Rot what we can; then we should Recycle; and finally, if none of those are applicable we need to find a way to Recover.

A single-use bag ban is a waste reduction activity, which reduces the number of bags produced from fossil fuels in the first place. Reducing the number of plastic bags produced is even more desirable than reusing them for a lunch bag, for example, and then discarding it after one or more reuses.

Reducing the number of single-use bags is two orders higher in the waste minimization hierarchy than recycling them.

Historically recycling plastic bags, if sorted properly, had one of the highest unit rates (price per tonne), of all recyclables, in the $100/tonne range, noting they are a commodity with fluctuating value subject to market demand. However, a plastic grocery bag weighs about seven grams, which means that 142,857 bags must be collected, sort and transported to market to realize $100 in revenue. This is not financially sustainable and is without consideration of their ultimate disposition (China?) and the associated impacts whether that be consumption of fossil fuels contributing to greenhouse gas emissions during transport activities for collection from households and shipment to markets, including overseas.

Former recyclables that cannot be reduced or reused should then be considered for waste recovery, to provide new benefits. Such benefits can include green energy, both heat and electricity and locally grown, low carbon footprint organic produce. Again St. Albert is leading this conversation.

With the vision of council and active initiatives underway such as consideration of a single-use bag ban, single item reduction strategy, advocating for extended producer responsibility, blue bag program, collecting glass and potentially Styrofoam at our depot, and considering waste recovery technologies, the City of St. Albert will continue to be a leader, if not the leader, in waste minimization, while realizing more value for money for our ratepayers and the potential to be one of the first communities, if not the first, to eliminate landfilling entirely.

The path to 100 per cent diversion away from landfills is not the city’s responsibility alone. The province needs to improve, producers need to improve and residents need to improve. And the Gazette as an avenue of education needs to stop finding fault and help disseminate the answers.

We all used to think that filling our organic bin and blue bag was great and we felt good about our efforts, but now we need to refocus the attention, which means a rebalancing within the waste minimization triangle to the biggest impact of the 5Rs – Reduction and Reuse!

Mayor Cathy Heron, St. Albert

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