Municipalities and ICI Waste

The City of Regina has been interested in the impact and opportunities of increased ICI waste minimization for many years. Their 1996 waste assessment revealed that the 5,000 ICI addresses in the city produced twice as much waste as the 55,000 single detached households. The city is in the process of updating its waste characterization study this year.

To date, the main strategy Regina has been using to encourage ICI waste diversion is economic. 1998 tipping fees have increased from $20/tonne to $33/tonne in small annual increments of $2 to $3 tonne. They expect this incremental approach to make it worthwhile for more businesses to seriously consider removing their recyclable materials from the waste stream.

Regina has also targeted the shopping malls, with good success. The Big Blue Bin residential paper recycling program, while being a successful initiative for shoppers, has also had a positive impact on the participating malls. All.the malls associated with the Big Blue Bin program are educated on paper recycling and are now recycling much of their paper and cardboard.

Future plans include a new waste bylaw and the possibility of harnessing some student power to conduct waste assessments for businesses.

The City of Saskatoon is also working on economic incentives for ICI customers, like different tipping fees for sorted vs. unsorted loads, and is including ICI waste in its new Saskatoon Waste & Recycling Plan.

The REACT waste management region picks up cardboard from businesses for a fee, but the fee is less than that for waste because it doesn’t include tipping fees. A few smaller businesses don’t even have waste bins! They have so little garbage after the cardboard is removed that they use the same REACT garbage tags as householders. (Now that’s where we need to get to.)

(Source: Sept. 2006 WasteWatch)

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