Garbage audit shows Edmonton falls short of standards

Edmonton's garbage operations need an overhaul, the city's auditor says in a new report released Thursday.

The audit found that the amount of waste diverted from the landfill to the waste management centre has declined over the past five years.

In 2013, 49.5 percent of residential and commercial garbagewent to the waste management centre for processing. That amount dropped to 35.7 percent by 2016.

Doug Jones, the city's deputy manager of operations, said the findings aren'tsurprising and that the city has been aware of the problems for at least a year.

He saidit's time to update the 20-year-old system.

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"Technology has changed," he said Thursday."What was acceptable or state of the art even five years ago or 10years ago, is changing so much now, so we have to change with it."

Edmonton has an all-encompassing waste management system that includes composting, recycling various materials such as paper and plastics, a separate recyclingspace for electronics, abiofuelsfacility and a landfill.

The cityadded aconstruction and demolition waste sectionin 2012.

When the facility was created, the goal was tokeep 90 per cent of residential waste out of the landfill by 2012. The city reduced the target to 65 per cent by 2018.

Overthe past five years, Edmonton has diverted about 51 per cent ofresidential wastefrom the landfill.

Coun. Michael Walters said he's disappointed and troubled about the audit, but not surprised.

"We've been hearing every year ... that we're not meeting our ambitious diversion-from-landfill targets."

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He said"innovation efforts" haven't worked as planned.

A biofuelsproject byEnerkem,which turns municipal solid waste into methanol andethanol has not been running at full capacity.

Walters said Edmonton needs a community-wide effort to reduce food waste.

"We still, as a first-world community in a first-world city, are wasting close to 40 per cent of the food that we purchase," he said. That, in turn, puts huge pressure on the city's waste processing facilities.

Residents' role

"Because everything is thrown together in one bag today from residences you end up with bits of plastic, broken glass, pieces of metal, that's all mixed in with the compost," Jonesexplained.

He said these materials are combinedtogether, resulting in a verylow-quality type of compost that's "very difficult to market commercially."

He said the city is limited to selling the compost to areas where people don't mind the contaminants as much.

China isone example of a jurisdictionclamping down on contaminants.

Jones said the city will look at involving residents more in waste management, by introducing methods such as a kitchen waste andorganics program.

"We don't have the facilities to collect it, so we would have to invest in green bins or something to put them it."

He saidEdmonton may start to see these changes in two to three years.

High-performance municipalities

The report also saysthe city isn't on par with other municipalities in its composting, separating, processingand disposal services.

Every municipality has a different way of dealing with waste, but Jones points to Halifax, Ottawa and Toronto as three exceptional examples.

Jones saidthe city hasaccepted all eight of the auditor's recommendations, including things like reviewing contract management, evaluating efficiencies and developing a strategy.

The operations branch is scheduled to present its new waste strategy to the city's utility committee at the end of February.

@natashariebe