Tales from the trash

As the early morning sun beamed down, the mountains of Jasper looked smaller than normal from the Hinton Landfill - a juxtapose of images with the mountains’ snowy peaks creeping over the little greenery that surrounds the copious amounts of waste obscured by the masses of sand that have been piled on top.

Doing a 360 turn on a tall mound of sludgy brown mud that was slowly drying as the day went on, the sun bounced off bits of tin and plastic peaking through the ground. 

A quick inhale gave a good impression of the surrounding area, a mixed sense of wet moldy socks combined with sour grapes that have sat in the sun a little too long, and the Ravens that flew madly above were ready to swoop in on their next big meal, coming all the way from Jasper. 

The birds stared delightedly at the truck Ross Pigeon, the solid waste supervisor for Parks Canada, was backing onto the landfill as he prepared to dump a full load of waste from Jasper, a destination tagged wonderful by nature - onto the already massive pile of brown crud that contains an array of trash from the area.

Pigeon has six years experience with hauling Jasper’s waste to Hinton - a trip he makes daily, though sometimes more in the Summer when the waste of tourists means Pigeon and his team need to do two trips to Hinton. 

On this particular day there was just one trip which cost Jasper residents $729.60. That’s about $41.00 for each metric tonne of waste that Pigeon and his crew ship to Hinton.

According to the 2007 Jasper waste audit, which suggested that “approximately half of the current waste being sent to landfill could have been diverted through full participation in the existing programs”, that daily bill could be lowered to just $364.00 for Jasper - if people appropriately separated all their trash.

If $41.00 per tonne doesn’t sound too bad, then multiply it by the 3108.19 tonnes of waste that Jasper residents provided the landfill with in 2008 and that quickly becomes a heftier number. 

Tumbling from the Parks Canada truck was a variety of items: plastic bags clinking and clanging - a noise that suggested recyclable cans and bottles were hidden within the black and green bags. White fans, black tires and an array of cardboard collected at the end of the truck as the waste continued to spew out onto the brown crud of the landfill.

All the waste comes directly from Jasper residents (and the surrounding area), the gorgeous mountain town that boasts its beauty to the world, by municipality workers that collect the garbage from throughout the townsite. 

Lyle Whately, lead hand supervisor for solid waste, knows the tale of Jaspers mounting piles of trash all to well as he has been working on route throughout Jasper as a municipality employee for seven years. 

For him, the adventure begins with the rainbow of bins that are found throughout Jasper - brown, green and blue scattering the landscape.

The green bins, for cardboard, sit side by side in many places - like ducks in a row - with the brown bin, designated for waste. 

Waste, by definition in Jasper, means anything you can’t recycle or compost but as Whately unloads the brown bin into the back of his truck there is a variety of cardboard seen.

It’s not just here that cardboard is seen, but also at the Hinton landfill and the Jasper Transfer Station and in the 2007 audit it was reported that recyclable paper was the largest portion of recyclable materials thrown out by Jasperites. 

As Whately unloads another bin that ear piercing noise begins again, tink, tink tink, tank and clink, clink, clink, clank, the bottles and cans - all recyclable - also become waste because of the lazy Jasperite who failed to separate their waste.

Another bin, a smaller blue one this time found in ten different locations throughout town, or the bottle depot is where the refundable portion of this noisey trash should have ended up.

For Lori Rissling Wynn, the environment stewardship coordinator for the municipality, the biggest problem is the silent one - the organic waste, which can generally be composted and is quite heavy so when it makes its way to Hinton it helps to bring up that daily cost significantly.

Organics were “consistently the highest contributor to the divertable portion of the waste stream for all sample areas” in the 2007 waste audit which is why the municipality has focused their attention on the waste.

Plus, according to Rissling Wynn, in the future municipalities will be able to receive carbon credits for composting efforts and this is just one reason for composting rather than trucking the waste to Hinton. 

Whately and his crew currently pick up compost (and cardboard) from about 20 commercial establishments throughout Jasper and ten other residential locations through town. Rissling Wynn said there will soon be anther 30 new bins to join the bears in the alleys across the townsite which is another positive step forward.

If your wondering where these bins, of all the colours of the rainbow, reside in Jasper then go to http://www.jasper-alberta.com/ and follow the links to Environmental Stewardship.