The Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) is considering major changes to its waste program after an audit this summer showed ample room to divert more waste from the landfill—including the possibility of encouraging businesses to take on standardized compostable packaging.
“I will just start off by saying that this is not glamorous work,” said Jessie Gresley-Jones, the RMOW’s general manager of resort experience, in a presentation to council on Feb. 8. “This is dirty work, but it is work that will have a significant impact on our village and on our commitment to sustainability objectives.”
In August, the RMOW, with guidance from the Association of Whistler Area Residents for the Environment (AWARE), undertook two waste audits (one over a single day and one over seven days) within the village and in Whistler’s major parks. The audits identified “clear gaps” in waste management, with a diversion rate of just 35 per cent, and the potential to achieve a village-wide rate of 76 per cent.
The seven-day audit collected 1,118 bags of garbage, with Lost Lake, Rainbow Park, Meadow Park and Alpha Lake as the top waste-generating parks. But the bulk of the trash—69 per cent—was collected from the village. “So the improvements to the parks that we have been making over time are making a difference, but we really need to dive into making substantive changes within the village streetscape environment,” Gresley-Jones said.
Contaminated streams
There are several factors complicating waste collection and disposal in Whistler’s streetscape environment. Inadvertent contamination of recycling and compostable streams is resulting in approximately 25-per-cent higher disposal costs for the RMOW, to the tune of about $12,000 a year. Part of that is a lack of compost bins in the village, something the RMOW wants to prioritize this summer. Coffee and ice cream cups, as well as dog waste—which made up 18 per cent of all waste collected in the audit—are significant contributors to contamination. Notably, while coffee cups accounted for just two per cent of the waste collected, they were found in 92 per cent of garbage bags, demonstrating the widespread confusion about which waste stream they belong in. Gresley-Jones said, at least on an interim basis, the RMOW is likely to implement a waste stream solely for coffee cups in the village “until we can grapple with [getting] businesses onboard to using the same product.”
One recommendation from the Feb. 8 report is for the RMOW to provide local businesses with a list of standardized compostable packaging products—from coffee cups and lids to takeout containers—to help guide their purchasing. “The goal is that we can align the businesses’ practices with the realities of our actual system,” Gresley-Jones said.
This would be no easy feat, of course. Fortunately, many local businesses are well ahead of the curve when it comes to compostable packaging, said Slope Side Supply co-owner Tony Horn.
“Probably around 2007, 2008, when VANOC really got going, there was a real push for compostability for the [2010] Olympics,” said Horn, adding that these days, his company only sells compostable coffee cups and cutlery. “We’ve just made corporate decisions that our customers thankfully have embraced and wanted to do.”
While in support of the RMOW’s approach, Horn said there are numerous variables complicating the possibility of standardized packaging, including COVID-related disruptions to the supply chain, as well as differing policy approaches around the world. He pointed to a recent policy change in Taiwan as an example, which meant the country no longer produced near the same level of affordable compostable packaging for overseas clients as before. Horn has also pitched the RMOW on coffee cups marked with a coloured dot that would match the appropriate trash bin, an approach the municipality is exploring, “but then it gets complicated, because we also sell to Pemberton and Squamish,” he said. “They have different philosophies around this stuff and they don’t have the same waste facilities we have, so we get into this weird situation where it’s not easy to do on our end.”
Drastic measures?
The RMOW is also considering the possibility of banning certain packaging products in the future, although municipal staff acknowledged it’s unclear whether the province would support such a move.
“This is likely to be seen as potentially controversial and heavy-handed, but it also sets a high bar for Whistler in taking definitive action to deal with sustainable waste,” Gresley-Jones said.
There is some precedent for such a move both regionally and nationally, however. A new City of Vancouver bylaw that went into effect Jan. 1 banned the use of plastic shopping bags and introduced a 25-cent charge for disposable cups. In December, the federal government released draft regulations to ban six kinds of “harmful” single-use plastics in Canada: straws and stir sticks, six-pack rings, grocery bags, cutlery and difficult-to-recycle takeout containers (although Canadian manufacturers will still be allowed to produce these items for export). The regulations are expected to come into effect sometime this year.
“Federal and provincial regulations have already announced plans to start phasing out (banning) consistently problematic waste streams,” wrote AWARE director Claire Ruddy in an email. “What we saw through local efforts to eliminate plastic bags was that voluntary programs can work (the bag charge at grocery stores initially saw a 50-per-cent reduction in bag use) but require constant community engagement, education, etc. The path to more permanent change will come through policy.”
Hero worship
AWARE has also played a huge role in improving diversion rates through its Zero Waste Heroes program, which sees staff overseeing waste segregation stations at large events and educating attendees on reducing their waste. On the days this summer when Zero Waste Heroes were in place, diversion rates nearly doubled, from 33 to 62 per cent, the RMOW found.
“The waste that ends up in streetscape bins is challenging, because there is such a huge mix of packaging products out there, [and] they can’t be cleaned like at home, so food/drink residues act as contaminants and every individual needs to read often hard-to-see labels, AND be clear which bin is the right one,” Ruddy wrote in her email.
That speaks to another recommendation from the report: improving signage and labelling and consolidating trash bins and removing any redundant receptacles throughout the village, with a particular focus on Olympic Plaza.
“You’ve probably noticed that when you’re on the [Village] Stroll, you can spin around and spot about three or four bins from any given location. So we will be looking at how to consolidate those and provide more flexibility, with more streams in one location,” Gresley-Jones explained.
He added that RMOW staff will draw from labelling standards and colours in other jurisdictions, with a particular emphasis on ensuring that visitors from the Lower Mainland “have a system of signage that is compatible and similar and easily understood.”
Although Whistler’s streetscape environment generates a fraction of the roughly 30,000 tonnes of waste generated in the community every year, it’s significant because of the village and parks’ high public visibility, said James Hallisey, the RMOW’s GM of infrastructure services.
“I’d like to see Whistler push ourselves back to more of a leadership position, and if we can be demonstrating to all of our visitors how we’re dealing with this, that is going to be a benefit that goes beyond Whistler,” he said. “So I think there’s a little extra importance to this topic beyond just a small fraction of our total waste stream.”
