Waste Management talks future plans

The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake Waste Management Department has big plans to make sure the community continues to be well served.

“Our plans are very dynamic. They’re always changing and growing,” said Holly McComber, general manager of Waste Management, at the department’s Let’s Talk Trash open house last Thursday.

“We, the province, and the world are constantly looking at ways to reduce garbage, because we’re drowning in garbage. Our environment is being heavily impacted by garbage, and that’s what we need to think about.”

The future of the department largely hinges on the creation of new facilities for Waste Management, which will hold a new ecocentre - currently the transfer depot - that won’t be sharing a space with the town garage and the paved composting bays.

McComber said they want to use the ecocentre name for the facility, to remove the “dump” connotation of the current transfer depot name.

“There’s a stigma attached to the transfer depot. It’s always called a dump. It’s not a dump. All the items there get recycled,” said McComber.

“When we move, it’s going to be bigger and better, and we’ll be able to pull out different items from the waste stream and be able to recycle them.” She is hoping their new space will also have some office space to allow the department to operate somewhere separate from the town garage, along with some space for workshops or community projects, like repairing objects like bicycles or simple electronics to avoid throwing them away.

Currently, residents can bring items like metals, car batteries, branches, paints, oils, and electronics to the transfer depot, free of charge.

With the change to cans and bottles collecting, where items now return a deposit of 10 cents when returned for recycling, McComber said that the department is preparing for the eventual adoption of deposits on all containers.

“Quebec is predicting that they’re going to be prepared on March 1 to start recycling drink containers between 100 ML and two litres, things like wine bottles, cider, spirits, water bottles, milk cartons, all those readily drinkable containers,” said McComber.

As such, McComber said they are looking into having a facility in town for the recycling of containers.

“I do want to gauge the community’s response to creating a container recycling facility,” said McComber.

The facility, if the permit is given by the provincial government, would use optic sorting, meaning done visually by a machine automatically instead of by hand or one by one by a sorting machine. The moving of the transfer depot will also allow more room for compost.

Furthermore, after a structural and operational assessment of the department’s staff, a rebalancing and expansion of the team could take place.

“This is an action item in my plan in order to look at Waste Management and make sure that we have the staff needed to carry out our plans,” said McComber.

She said that starting in the winter, the department will be regularly on K1037 Radio to talk about waste management, and get the community involved and informed about how it works and what people in town can do to reduce their waste.

Iotshatena:wi Reed, communications liaison for waste management, said that outreach efforts like the open house and a radio presence will hopefully get Kahnawake involved in lowering waste.

“We should be finding ways to adjust our lifestyle, to stop buying so much, maybe using more secondhand things. We want to be pushing to be not necessarily a waste-free community, but just reducing our waste,” said Reed.

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