Todd R. Pepper

By Todd R. Pepper

Those of us who operate public integrated waste management systems often ask ourselves questions about the wastestream we attempt to manage. How much waste is being generated? How much can potentially be diverted? How much has to be landfilled? How do we design our systems to manage the fluctuations between diversion and disposal? To attempt to find answers to these questions, we weigh our trucks and divide by households. We do waste audits, sorting out what is still in the garbage bag that should be in a diversion program. Much of this information, however, is gathered at the macro level.

To find out what is happening at the micro level, I have volunteered my family (a huge thank you to my wife and our three teenagers who so far have humoured me by lending their assistance to this project) to separate and measure our household waste for a year. Through this project we are attempting to find out how much waste a household really generates and how much of that waste can be diverted given reasonable efforts and within the constraints of the public waste management system made available to the average household in North America.

We live in Leamington, a small town in the County of Essex in the southwest corner of the province of Ontario, Canada. We are provided with once-a-week garbage collection, once-a-week yardwaste collection from April to October, and once-a-month junk collection by our town for which we pay an annual fee of $90. We also get a special leaf collection service in October and November. The Essex-Windsor Solid Waste Authority (EWSWA), where I am general manager, provides biweekly recycling collection and operates a transfer station and a public drop-off depot about 5 km from our home that includes a composting pad where we can drop off yardwaste year-round and a Household Chemical Collection Centre (for used paint, pesticides, and so on). The depot also provides bins for the recycling of cardboard, metal, and white goods. Our recycling collection program collects old newspapers and magazines, boxboard, cardboard, junk mail, fine paper, telephone books, aluminum and steel cans, plastic PET bottles, and coloured and clear glass bottles and jars. EWSWA also sells backyard composters and promotes the use of mulching blades for lawnmowers. I have both.

The Pepper Pail Project started on January 15, 2001. Since then, every garbage pail, Blue Box, and kitchen compost pail has been weighed before being set out for collection or dumped in the backyard composter. There is no attempt to determine what is in the garbage pail itself. Suffice it to say, it is everything that cannot be diverted through the programs listed previously. In volume, the majority of the waste in the garbage pail is plastic packaging materials not collected in our current recycling program. Personal hygiene products (tissues, cotton swabs, and so on) also make up a significant part of the volume. Yes, some of these materials can be "reduced," but there are just some things I won’t do, such as carry a handkerchief in my pocket as my grandfather did. The weight in the garbage pail, at least so far, is mostly foodwaste (e.g., fat and bones).

With this background out of the way, here are the results for the first three months of 2001 (note: 1 kg = 2.2 lb.).

Garbage 50.5 kg
Blue Box Recyclables 61.5 kg
Backyard Compostables 19.6 kg
Yardwaste to Compost Pad 40.0 kg
Other Diversion 2.9 kg
Total 174.5 kg
Diversion 71%

In the first 12 weeks of this project, the average weekly rate of garbage set out for collection is 4.2 kg. There were two weeks when we didn't bother to take the pail out to the curb because of insufficient garbage. If this trend holds for the year, we will place out 218 kg of garbage for disposal in 2001. The average household in Essex-Windsor set out 818 kg of garbage for disposal in 2000.

The average amount of recyclables set out for biweekly collection in the first 12 weeks was 10.25 kg. If this amount remains constant, we will set out 266.5 kg of recyclables this year. The average household in Essex-Windsor set out 178 kg of recyclables in 2000.

About 47% of our household Blue Box materials was a mix of old newspaper and old magazines, whereas that mix is approximately 64% of all recyclables collected by the EWSWA in 2000. This is surprising. Since we subscribe to the regional daily newspaper and the local weekly paper, as well as a number of weekly and monthly magazines, I thought we would be closer to the average.

What is not surprising is the amount of containers (tin, aluminium, and PET) in our Blue Box compared to the average. The average is 8%, while in our household it is 18.3% (caffeinated cola products are the beverage of choice of several people in our house, with at least two cases of cans–or their equivalent in PET bottles–consumed each week).

The quantity of material going into our backyard composter is also surprising. There is an old figure kicking around that the average household will place 120 kg/yr. of kitchen waste into its backyard composter. We are fairly regular consumers of fresh vegetables and fruit, and I seem to empty the kitchen pail regularly; however, the total so far only averages 1.6 kg each week. At this rate, we will be hard-pressed to reach 85 kg for the year. Maybe we will make that up during the summer barbecue season.

Todd R. Pepper is general manager of the Essex-Windsor Solid Waste Authority in Ontario, Canada.