Saturday 23 April 2011

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Compost!

In some spare time this weekend I googled my city's recycle program.  I knew that we had recently put in a new recycling centre, but was AMAZED to learn some of the details about it and wanted to share!

My municipality currently diverts approximately 60% of waste from the landfill, and the city has a goal of diverting 90% of waste by 2013, which is a VERY exciting stat.  Approximately 30% of households have a compost (I'll be adding to that stat this year!) and the city has a team of "Compost Doctors and Masters" who you can talk to about any composting questions or problems, and have a comprehensive site about beginning and maintaining a compost here .

A couple of other neat facts about the city:

-88% of the population voluntarily participates in the recycling program
-We have the largest composting facility in North America (as graded by size and volume)
-In 2012 we are opening the world’s first industrial scale municipal waste-to-biofuels facility which, as the website states, will convert 100,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste into 36 million litres of biofuels annually and help reduce Alberta’s carbon dioxide (CO2) footprint by six million tonnes over the next 25 years—the equivalent of removing 42,000 cars off the road every year.
-We have an E-waste recycle centre in which 30,000 tonnes/year of old computers, appliances, televisions etc. get recycled
-The city has a variety of reuse drop off stations where people can go to peruse items that can be reused.

This is just a handful of ways that my city is starting to make a difference, and learning all of this makes me very interested to see what comes next!  I am glad to see that such an effort is being made to reduce the footprint left by our population.

What sorts of facilities and projects does your municipality have in place?  Share below!

1 comment:

  1. These are amazing facts!
    Makes me proud to be an Edmontonian! :D

    ReplyDelete