Waste management key topic at Yellowknife climate change roundtable

Waste management was one of the key topics at a roundtable discussion at Yellowknife city hall, where people were invited to talk to the city about its upcoming climate action plan. 

The new document will map out the city's climate actions over the next decade, starting in 2026, and eight people – most representing groups or organizations – showed up Tuesday to try and help shape it. The current energy action plan ends this year.

Lois Little, a Yellowknife resident who has helped organize local Seniors for Climate events over the last few months, told the city that it should be doing more to keep construction waste out of the city's landfill. 

"We're trucking in lumber, [and] making concrete is an emission-intense activity," she explained. Reusing those materials instead of bringing them to the dump would not only expand its limited lifespan but could save money, she said. 

"These are win-wins."

Dawn Tremblay, the executive director of Ecology North, expressed dismay at a vague item shown on a slide of draft actions the city was planning, that read, "develop waste diversion program." 

"That is much too weak," she said. "It's probably just a placeholder in a first draft and I understand that, but I just want it to be said really clearly that we can make that really strong.

"We have some great systems in place that need attention from council, that need attention from the public, because they're there – but they're not quite performing as well as they could. They need some love. I'm thinking specifically of the compost program."

Underscoring the significance of the role garbage plays in the changing climate, Shane O'Hanlon, a consultant with the firm Stantec, said that fugitive emissions from the landfill are now accounted for in the city's emission data. 

That means emissions coming from waste that's already in the dump – not just what is going into it each year – have driven up the city's corporate emission totals. 

The city had two goals it wanted to hit this year: it had hoped to cut its corporate emissions by half of what they had been in 2009, and hoped the community would reduce its emissions in the same timeframe by 30 per cent. 

O'Hanlon said preliminary data as of last week shows the community has exceeded its goal by reducing emissions by 49 per cent, while corporate emissions – now taking into account more methane from the landfill – have gone up by 166 per cent. 

There was also a lot of discussion around what the city could do to get more people switching to active forms of transportation — and how the city could reach more people with its survey. 

According to the platform where people can access the survey, it had been filled out by 97 people as of Tuesday afternoon. It'll be available until Feb. 10. 

O'Hanlon said there was to be more engagement on the plan in the coming months, and that it should be done this coming August.