No more commercial unsorted waste for the Jasper Transfer Station

Despite no community consultation, the mixed-waste dump section of the Jasper Transfer Station will be closed to commercial users this September.

The closure will not affect residential waste, as there will be a multi-skip onsite so that Jasper residents can still dump their unsorted waste that Parks Canada will then take to the Hinton landfill.

For commercial users, the closure will mean transporting their waste to Hinton, where there is a charge of about $120/tonne for unsorted waste.

Currently, commercial users can dump their unsorted waste in Jasper for $55/tonne and $35/tonne for sorted waste.

“For the $20 more, most people are just dumping it all in one big unsorted mess,” said Jurgen Deagle, realty and municipal services manager for Parks Canada.

For Ken Kuzminski, carpenter for Meggison Contracting, the closure of the pit means extra costs for consumers.

“It’s going to cost customers extra money,” he said, “it’s all going to get passed onto the consumer.”

Due to a current fee freeze Jasper National Park (JNP) cannot increase the cost of dumping at the Jasper site, but as soon as the freeze is over the cost for dumping unsorted waste will increase, Deagle said.

“We’d like to increase the spread between those two fees. So, leave the sorted waste at $35 and then increase the waste for unsorted, to be more of an incentive.”

Deagle estimates that about 30 loads a day get dumped into the pit section of the dump, but is unsure the number of commercial users this would be. Nonetheless, it will mean increased traffic between Jasper and the Hinton dump, he said.

According to Kuzminski, having to ship the waste to Hinton means extra hours to get rid of the waste.

“It’s going to take a lot more time out of our work days to go and do that,” he said.

Jasper mayor Richard Ireland expressed his concern about the closure of the dump at last week’s council meeting.

“Unwanted garbage will pile up,” he said. “From a municipal perspective, we should prepare for an increase in dumping. It’s already a bit of a problem, it’s liable to get worse.”

However, according to Deagle the illegal dumping that occurs is normally from residents rather than business owners or contractors. Thus, because there will still be a place for the dumping of residential mixed-waste, he doesn’t believe this should be an issue.

One incentive for the JNP to close the pit was the access to federal grant money that was announced as part of the federal government’s economic stimulus package.

“One of the areas that they’re spending on is contaminated sites... if we don’t spend it by March next year the money is gone... the $200,000 that we’re asking for this year disappears,” he said.

“So that comes from outside the park, because it’s been an expensive project,” he added noting that estimated had ranged from $800,000 to $18 million.

The decision to close the dump has been looming for over a year and despite this, Deagle admits there has been no real community consultation – a fact that surprised Kuzminski.

“It’s been talked about for almost a year now but there’s been no formal communication,” he said adding that “it was more of a parks decision that it’s not acceptable to continue to contaminate the ground water in the national park.”

“The pit area in the back of the transfer station doesn’t meet any of the regulations for landfills. And that, from a park and community perspective, isn’t where we want to be – we want to be environmental leaders and we’re not demonstrating that leadership.”

This sentiment reflects the reoccurring theme throughout community consultations for the Jasper Community Sustainabilty Plan (JCSP) that Jasper should be an environmental leader with the ability to market itself as a “green destination”.

As Kuzminski sits on the Environmental Stewardship Advisory Committee the idea of closing the dump wasn’t new, but even he admits, “there was never a firm deadline for that.”

“I’m a bit surprised that they haven’t given the community a bit more notice on that but what can we do? Ever since I moved to town ten years ago they’ve always been talking about how the dump was going to close.”

For Deagle, the closure will have less of an effect if contractors and commercial users of the dump simply sort their waste instead of dumping a load of mixed-waste. However, this might mean having several bins to separate wood, metal, clean fill and any other waste.