Powell River’s Let’s Talk Trash team has organized a number of initiatives from October to the end of the year in an effort to divert as much waste from the landfill as possible.
Team members Coco Hess, Abby McLennan and Tai Uhlmann have been focusing on zero waste during October. Canada’s national Waste Reduction Week is October 15 to 21.
They kicked off the month with a commercial waste audit and composition study. Team members collected waste from about 20 local businesses and sorted through it to learn what is actually going into commercial waste. They weighed out the organic material, which gave them information about how much of that material could be pulled from the waste stream.
This week, they are announcing a Zero Waste Challenge, which takes place from November 1 to December 31. The month ends with a Zero Waste Conference.
The Let’s Talk Trash team is funded through a contract from Powell River Regional District and provides education about waste reduction. Hess is responsible for the regional district’s Composting Advisory Committee and for liaising with the regional district and City of Powell River. McLennan focuses on initiatives with Powell River’s school district, including its Destination Conservation program.
Uhlmann joined the team last spring. She is responsible for the compost education centre, which is located in the garden behind Powell River Community Resource Centre and has been putting on one or two workshops a month. “There has been amazing participation,” said Hess. “There are a lot more freezer composters being made, so it’s going very well.”
The zero waste challenge is designed to encourage community members to reduce their waste for the last two months of the year, Hess explained. Participants will keep track of the amount of waste that is diverted from the landfill, either through composting, recycling or refundables.
Residents and businesses can sign up for the challenge online and report, monitor and keep track of their garbage through Survey Monkey, an online tool.
With Metro Vancouver’s permission, the team is using its holiday campaign from 2011, Hess said, which was Create Memories, Not Garbage. “Our goal is for November and December to see if we can actually reduce the amount of waste being exported,” she said.
What the team hopes the zero waste challenge will do is get people thinking about what they’re putting into their garbage can, Hess said. “It’s mostly a way of saying, we have two months left in this year, how can we reduce the amount of waste we’re going to throw out?”
The zero waste conference takes place from 6 to 9 pm on Monday, October 29 at Max Cameron Theatre. “It’s a way to get the community talking trash,” Hess said.
The event is free and includes a presentation from the team around its initiatives. As well, Aaron Mazurek, chair of the Composting Advisory Committee, will talk about the future of centralized composting in Powell River. After the presentations, participants will break out into discussions around re-use, re-build, recycle and reduce, followed by a question and answer period.
The end of the night features a 20-minute preview of Tide Lines, a documentary about the OceanGybe Global Research and Outreach Expedition, a three-year, 40,000-mile (64,500-kilometre) voyage around the world in a sailboat. Three University of Victoria engineering graduates, brothers Ryan and Bryson Robertson, along with their good friend Hugh Patterson, collected data on garbage on beaches, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of five ocean gyres where currents congregate and sweep together debris from around the world. Patterson will be in attendance to speak about the adventure.
While the month focuses on zero waste, Hess pointed out that zero waste is an ambitious target. “I recognize that zero waste as a philosophy is an ideal and it’s a great place that we need to strive toward,” she said. “If we were to reduce our waste year over year, from 2011 to 2012, with the zero waste challenge by even 10 to 20 per cent, I would be impressed. I’m not looking for zero.”
More information is available on the Let's Talk Trash website. Interested readers can pre-register for the conference online and receive a to-go coffee mug.
