By Michael Joel-Hansen

City puts on second annual waste reduction week conference

Oct 16, 2018 | 5:00 PM

This week marks National Waste Reduction Week across Canada and the City of Prince Albert is not letting the occasion go to waste.

The city hosted their second annual Waste Reduction Week Conference at the John M. Cuelenaere Public Library, which featured a number of speakers from a variety of organizations.

One of those speakers was Nisar Ghani, the sanitation manager for the City of Prince Albert. Ghani’s speech to the audience, which consisted mostly of students from École St. Mary and King George Community School, focused on the city looking to get more people to compost.

Speaking to paNOW, Ghani explained there’s hope residents will send less to the landfill in coming years.

“The residents of Prince Albert they are recycling only 24 per cent, so we want to make it at least 55 per cent by 2025,” he said.

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Reducing the amount of waste which is sent to the city’s landfill is not just better for the environment, but is something which is especially important for the city given the current state of the landfill.

“The way we are filling it (landfill) right now, it would maybe be like three years or maybe the most would be four,” Ghani said.

When looking at the cost of replacing the current facility, Ghani speculated it would cost the city a lot.

“I would say more than four million dollars,” he said.

Composting would have a large impact in terms of waste diversion as Ghani said much of the waste which ends up there could be composted.  

While the city has curbside mutli-material recycling it does not have curbside organic waste pick up (compost) as that would be quite expensive, according to Ghani. 

Ghani said with people working to recycle more waste along with composting on their own, he is optimistic the waste reduction goals can be attained.

“We can make that target,” he said.

Editor’s note: this article has been corrected to show residents currently recycle 24 per cent, not 34 per cent as originally stated. Also, the story clarifies that while the city of P.A. does not have organic curbside recycling it does have curbside multi-material recycling.  

MichaelJoel.Hansen@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: mjhskdn