GFL takes a deep dive into Fredericton’s waste

When the City of Fredericton, New Brunswick, approached GFL to conduct a waste audit of their residential garbage, Environmental Manager Laura McAlpine was excited to find out what it contained.

“A waste audit is a great tool to determine what the composition of a waste stream is and how much recyclable material ends up in it,” McAlpine said. “It helps us identify further opportunities for diverting waste from the landfill.”

Based in Toronto, Ontario, the Environmental team that McAlpine manages provides sustainability support to GFL’s customers across Canada, which includes conducting waste audits, reporting, providing education and training, and advising companies how to divert more waste from landfills and into recycling streams.

To conduct Fredericton’s waste audit, the team collected garbage from a sample of 10 houses per street, sampling 80 households’ garbage in total over several days. For the most accurate results, the team ensured that garbage was picked up in the same way as usual so homeowners wouldn’t change their disposal habits.

“The City of Fredericton has a few comprehensive recycling programs and they wanted to determine how much recyclable material was ending up in the waste stream,” McAlpine said.

Fredericton has a curbside blue box recycling program for paper, plastic, metal, and glass, and they have a depot where beverage containers can be returned for a refund.

The Environmental team are detectives who try to figure out why things end up in the garbage rather than being recycled.

After collecting the garbage from the sample homes, it was taken to a site where the Environmental team tore open the bags and sorted through the garbage. They separated it into categories like paper, plastic, metal, glass, organic waste, and hazardous waste which includes electronics and batteries, and other items that don’t fit any categories.

The larger categories of waste were broken down into subcategories. Plastics were sorted by numbers 1 through 7, and nonrecyclable plastics such as rigid plastics made up of cutlery, straws, and toothbrushes, for example, and plastic films were separated.

Paper and cardboard were also separated into subcategories like paper cups, cardboard, boxboard, and newspaper. Compostable organic materials were separated from napkins and paper towels.

When all of these materials were sorted, the team weighed each subcategory and took photos of everything.

“Once we go through the entire sample, we put the results together in a full report for the customer, that includes things like capture rates, calculated diversion rate, and potential diversion rates,” McAlpine said.

Being Fredericton’s first waste audit, it established a baseline from which future audits can be measured to determine whether new policies for diversion of recyclable waste are working.

When conducting a waste audit, the team brings any contamination concerns or issues that they find to the customer's attention so they can focus on getting that material out of the waste stream and putting it into a recycling program or figuring out how it can be reused.

In the case of the City of Fredericton’s waste audit, GFL discovered that more than 60% of the garbage being put out for curbside collection could be diverted from the landfill by recycling, donating, or composting those materials.

GFL’s Environmental team does much more than investigate municipal waste. They put their garbage sleuthing skills to work for a variety of customers from schools to hospitals to shopping centers and manufacturing facilities.

Each business or industry has their own specific concerns about recycling. “When we give a customer the results of our audit and they ask us for help to improve diversion rates and we see positive results in a follow-up waste audit, that makes me feel really good about what we do,” McAlpine said.

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