A U of A grad’s guide to good garbage

by Kim Green

Ask Larry George, ’64 BPE, if he likes what he’s doing and you’ll see this glow come over him as he seems to swell up from inside as an even bigger smile is superimposed over his already beaming countenance. “I love what I’m doing,” he says. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d get this. I used to be just a jock,” says the former physical education teacher. “I coached junior and senior high school wrestling, basketball, soccer, you name it. But now I’m excited about what the Edmonton Waste Management Centre [EWMC] is doing as a team.”

About 13 years ago George was seconded from his teaching job — he also taught outdoor and environmental education, science and mathematics — to take on the role of leading educational tours around the City of Edmonton’s waste management centre at the eastern edge of the city. The goal was to tie in the on-the-ground, vanguard work the City was doing to enhance its recycling capabilities with the classroom work on the same subject that elementary students were doing. “We’re supplementing what they’re getting in the classroom,” George says, “showing them how compost is actually made.” By all measures that mutually beneficial relationship has worked out very well. George guided over 7,000 people around the EWMC site in his first year on the job. Now his successor, Brant Maidens, ’90 BEd, takes around 8,000 students (most in Grade 4 who have “Waste and Our World” as one of their science units), teachers and parents through the various recycling processes, while in semi-retirement (three days a week) George still handles another 5,000.

Maidens has also been seconded from his teaching position with the Edmonton Public School Board as years ago the City thought it a good idea to employ teachers to, well, teach about what’s going on at the world leader in waste management. He’s on the second of his two-year ongoing contracts and will probably end up being the new George — if the old George ever fully retires — some day down the road because, as he says, “This is a totally fun job.”

He even has a bit of fun with the class of Grade 4 and 5 students in the video presentation he gives during my visit prior to taking them out on the grounds. About the compost that EWMC makes on site and then sells, he says to the group of eager students: “Do you know your parents pay us to take away your garbage. Your parents are buying their garbage back from us,” he smiles. “Pretty good deal.” (Another pretty good deal is the approximately $20,000 a month that EWMC makes on the refundable bottles, cans and cartons that end up in a garbage truck but are diverted from the landfill.)

But the big money is in the composting facility — a massive structure the size of seven football fields. It’s the largest composting operation in North America and is designed to handle all the organic garbage coming out of the average household. “About half of the garbage coming out of a home in Edmonton is composed of biodegradable material,” says George, whose official business card title is “environmental educator.” “That’s a resource for making compost. Our compost plant produces about 50,000 tonnes of compost a year. We sell it to farmers and landscapers and the City of Edmonton and whoever else wants it. If we made more than 50,000 tonnes we could sell it.”

How it works is that the garbage trucks drive into the building and dump their contents on the concrete floor where workers look for anything in the loads that is not compostable or might gum up the works. Then everything that’s left over is shoved into a hole in the floor where the garbage bags are shredded and their contents exposed in their long journey to becoming viable compost.

The household waste is mixed with sewage sludge as it travels for two days down long rotating tubes that do a complete rotation about once a minute. The material is then screened through a large trommel drum — a rotating cylindrical screen — where anything larger than a softball is removed from the process. Once everything that can’t be composted is removed the material ends up in the aeration hall that’s the size of about four football fields. There it takes approximately 32 days for the organics to be turned into compost that is cured for another four to six months before being ready for market.

“As we stand now,” says George, “about 60 percent of what we get from the residential sector is being either composted or recycled. The other 40 percent is going to landfill. It can be something as simple as the plastic bag the garbage comes to us in or an old garden hose. But a lot of the residuals that go into the landfill contain carbon. The next step for Edmonton is to shred all that material that can’t be composted or recycled and feed it into a biofuels facility that can turn these materials into methanol and ethanol.”

The biofuels facility — built by Enerkem GreenField Alberta Biofuels, with funding from the Alberta Energy Research Institute — is anticipated to be operational in 2011 at which time, says George, “the diversion rate from landfill sites will reach approximately 90 percent and we’ll have completely adopted the attitude that garbage is a resource that you can do something else with.”

Standing below the leading edge of the glacier of debris in the landfill site it’s clear why we have to move away from merely burying our refuse. About a hundred feet up a constant parade of trucks discharge their detritus while bulldozers struggle to keep up with the pace as they push the garbage over the cliff, so the whole scene looks like some nightmarish and crumbling Tower of Babylon guarded over by marauding gulls and crows.

This is what Edmonton is trying to alleviate and is among the best at the world at coming to terms with. How­ever, landfill of some sort will probably always be with us as some things are beyond recycling, and all one can do is try to make all the processes as benign — and fruitful — as possible. To this end, the 80-hectare landfill that will top out at 47 metres above ground has about 70 gas extraction wells drilled into it. Landfill gas is typically a mixture of 50 percent methane and 50 percent carbon dioxide. Other landfills often just burn off the gas so it doesn’t build to dangerously explosive levels, but this process contributes to global warming. In Edmonton, the methane is used to fuel gas-fired engines that power an EPCOR-owned-and-operated electrical generating facility connected to the Edmonton distribution grid that provides electricity for about 5,000 homes, which amounts to a greenhouse gas reduction roughly equivalent to taking 44,000 cars off city streets each year.

Another private sector initiative at the EWMC is the Global Electric and Electronic Processing facility, which takes apart old televisions, computers and other e-waste to reclaim the valuable metals — such as gold, silver, copper and mercury — inside them as well as the various components of glass, metal and plastic.

The EWMC is also home to the Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence (EWMCE), a non-profit corporation formed by the City of Edmonton in partnership with the Uni­versity of Alberta, the Alberta Research Council, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, AMEC Earth and Environ­mental Services and EPCOR. The mandate of this organization is to investigate new and sustainable ways to handle waste and to market that knowledge. The facility’s executive director is Jerry Leonard, ’86 PhD, who is on secondment from the U of A, where he is a professor of bioresource engineering. Through his composting research, Leonard became involved with the City of Edmonton’s Waste Management Branch in 1996 and set up the EWMCE as a non-profit corporation in 2003.

“Waste management issues and problems are researched here in a laboratory setting,” says George. “They’ve done such simple but effective studies as finding out the best size for a wood chip when you’re composting wood. This Centre has agreements signed with cities in China that want to replicate what we’re doing here. So now we’re signing licencing agreements with our proprietary material.

“People come from all over the world to see what we’re doing here and take some of those ideas back home,” continues George, while standing in the administration building in front of a map of the world that’s become a pincushion for the hundreds of people who’ve marked where they’ve come from to get here and take some valuable lessons about how to manage waste back home with them.

But, as George points out, the reason Edmonton’s waste management systems exists as it does now was not initially because of some big goal statement. “It’s because we had a garbage crisis back in the 1980s,” he says. “We were burying everything that people threw out, causing all the landfills to fill up at an alarming rate.* So the waste management people said we’d better go looking for another site to use when this one’s full. But everywhere they went — which included about 100 locations within an hour’s drive from Edmonton — they ran into the NIMBY phenomenon... Not In My Backyard.”**

So the City was forced to resort to plan B — which they didn’t have at the time. But it was clear that the City’s residents and those outside the City who are also impacted by waste issues wanted a system that was convenient, affordable and sustainable. It took a dozen years, but in 1992 the City finally came up with a 30-year strategic plan to deal with waste management in Edmonton.

This is where George almost gets choked up as he is clearly as proud of this system as he would be of his own son or daughter bringing home Olympic Gold. George’s life may be garbage, but he wouldn’t have it any other way as he looks out at the work in progress that is the EWMC and where he has spent the past 13 years preaching the gospel of garbage and says: “Had we found another nearby landfill I probably wouldn’t be here, nor would we have the composting facility or the 30-year strategic plan that has so far served us so very, very, very well.”

*Edmonton’s Mill Woods and Rundle Park golf courses are both built on top of former landfill sites.

**There are still landfills for Edmonton’s garbage. One is the privately owned west Edmonton landfill operated by Waste Manage­ment of Canada. Another is located in Ryley, about an hour’s drive southeast of the city — a drive that’s now a whole lot more perilous (the EWMC landfill site closed in August) as about one semi-truck full of material destined for the landfill site in Ryley leaves the EWMC every 10 minutes. Nearby residents have already nicknamed the landfill site in their vicinity Mount Ryley. Once the biofuels facility is added to the EWMC site the traffic headed to “Mount Ryley” should ease considerably.

Just Ducky

When the new composting facility was built at the EWMC, it encroached on some natural wetlands, where ducks and geese can be seen paddling about and deer occasionally stop by for a drink.

“When I take tours around, the biggest thrill for the kids is when we have to stop the bus to let a mother duck and her ducklings waddle across the road to the water,” says George. “I just turn off the bus and watch because there’s no getting the kids attention away from the ducks.”

But before any of that in situ wetland was filled in, the area it occupied was carefully measured so that after construction was complete an equal amount of wetland could be added so that the total acreage of the small marsh remained exactly the same.

That was a small price to pay for conserving waterfowl habitat and something that Katherine Packman, a graduate student in the Department of Rural Economy in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences, would like to see others follow. To that end, Packman has put a dollar figure on what it would cost to restore previously drained wetlands that once provided habitat for such environmentally friendly creatures as ducks, frogs and insects: $1,150 per acre. That’s the amount she came up with based on her study of 36 farms in southern Manitoba when she estimated how much money would be needed to re-establish wetlands on those lands, factoring in machinery costs, loss of crop-land production, labour and consulting fees.

“By putting an actual cost to wetland restoration, the element of the unknown is removed,” says Packman. “The information may encourage farmers to make the investment when they realize it is within their budgets, thus bringing back something that has a significant environmental benefit when brought back to the prairie landscape.”

Paper Chase

Daryl McCartney, environmental engineering professor at the U of A, was the supervisor for a green challenge project taken on by a group of U of A students under the leadership of Dallas Demontigny, ’08 BSc. In his graduating year, Demontigny’s team was one of four groups across Canada to win a competition from the TD Friends of the Environ­ment Foundation, beating out nearly 90 other teams to take home $25,000 (a dollar amount matched by the U of A) to finance their Paper Cut program.

The money was used to fund a paper audit on campus aimed at cutting down on the amount of paper used as well as looking into a campus-wide switching over to more sustainable paper sources certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council. The final report — submitted to the U of A Office of Sustainability by Michael Rawson Clark, ’07 BSc, executive director of the Campus Sustainability Coalition, and Debra J. Davidson, director of the Environ­mental Research and Studies Centre — used the School of Public Health’s (SPH) paper consumption behaviours to represent a typical academic and administrative unit on the U of A campus.

Based on the paper audit, the SPH was able to reduce its environmental footprint by approximately 23 percent while saving almost $4,000 a year. The report goes on to “recommend that a wide-scale behavioural change program be initiated at the University of Alberta,” noting that the U of A purchased 126,539 reams of copy paper in 2008 and that by implementing the changes incorporated in the SPH, the U of A could see savings of over $200,000 annually.

“It’s important for a university to take a lead on reducing paper use,” says McCartney, “since about 60 percent of campus waste is paper.”

Demontigny says that the Paper Cut program also focuses on educating staff and students about paper usage. “Even making small changes,” says Demontigny, “such as printing on both sides of the paper, or even changing the margins on draft documents, can make a big difference.

“We want to help the University of Alberta and other campuses reduce their environmental footprint,” he continues. “Universities, after all, play an important part in setting examples that influence change.”

Very Green & Gold

The University of Alberta is truly green and gold,” says U of A president Indira Samarasekera. “Green in terms of our commitment to environmental sustainability and gold in terms of being winners and leaders as we achieve our sustainability goals.”

Those sustainability goals saw the University recently ranked by Maclean’s magazine as one of “Canada’s Top 30 Greenest Employers.” In the magazine’s special green issue it made note of the University’s 35-year-old recycling program and made special mention of the U of A’s $25-million energy management program that will save more than $1.7 million in utility costs and reduce CO2 emissions by 20,000 tonnes annually; the “green demolition” program that encourages salvage and reuse of building materials during renovations and demolitions; sustainable cleaning practices that include using environmentally friendly cleaning chemicals; and the fact that the University has a program in place to compost organic kitchen waste from its dining facilities as well as landscaping waste. The U of A has also recently purchased hybrid mail trucks.

As well, Triffo Hall (formerly the historic South Lab) became the first project at the Univer­sity to be registered with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) association. The building has already passed its first review for Gold LEED certification and is, as of this writing, under-going its second review. (When completed, the new Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science will have a LEED-Silver equivalent rating.)

In March of this year, Triffo Hall also received the Sustaina­bility Award from the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction. This award recognizes steel structures in which steel has been used or re-used as part of a sustainable development project that aims to improve the environmental impact of the structure by using established and innovative design, standards and technologies.

“We knew from the start we would approach the project from a sustainability standpoint,” says Laura Plosz, an associate with Johns Group2 Architecture Engineering. “Steel was the primary structural material, so we decided to work with it.”

The ability to re-use the existing steel structure and construct new elements with steel contributed significantly to the sustainability of the project. Of the existing steel, 99.5 percent was retained; of the new steel material, 100 percent is recycled. “That means it’s also 100 per cent recyclable,” says Plosz, “which is one of the most fantastic aspects of using steel.”

Another recent undertaking at the U of A is the creation of the Office of Sustainability — a central hub for campus initiatives that encompass energy conservation, the environment, climate change, water and human health. In addition to promoting green-thinking in all University endeavours, it will also enlist the expertise of scholars and research centres across disciplines to educate students on the importance of sustainability in today’s world.

“It’s part of our responsibility to ensure that no student should emerge without an understanding of what sustaina­bility means within their specialization,” says Colin Soskolne, academic co-coordinator of the new office and a professor of epidemiology in the Department of Public Health Sciences. (In August, Trina Innes was announced as the Office’s director and will assume her position effective September 8.) Ventures such as the U of A’s Office of Sus­tainability are not unique on Canadian campuses, but what sets the U of A endeavour apart is the calibre and quantity of the many experts on energy, the environment and climate change currently at work on campus.

“If we can somehow harness some of these energies and provide mechanisms for students to come and do cross-faculty, interdisciplinary master’s and PhD work [in sustainability studies], we’ll leapfrog pretty quickly over most parts of the world,” says Soskolne.