Meet our team!
Kali Little:
Kali is a 3rd year dietetics student at UBC and she is very interested in the link between diet and disease and how this knowledge can be used to reduce chronic disease risk. She also has a personal and professional interest in food, working towards a more sustainable food system, and improving food security. Outside of school, she enjoys spending time in the outdoors, hiking and cycling among other things, and loves having the opportunity to travel and learn about people and places around the world.
Alexander de Demko:
Alexander is a 4th year UBC student majoring in global Resource Systems in the faculty of Land and Food Systems. He is currently in his last semester and will be graduating in May of 2016. Within the GRS program, Alexander has decided to focus on international trade and development. He is also completing a minor in commerce along with his Bachelor of Science. Alex had been studying at the University of California, Davis for the last year and a half in an effort to gain an international perspective on current global political and economic issues. Professionally and academically, he is interested in policymaking, income inequality, entrepreneurship and strategic management. He is also a self-employed math tutor and has experience planning events. As for Alex’s personal interests, he enjoys electronic music, attending concerts, making wine, travelling and spending time with his family, friends and girlfriend.
Wesley Hardy:
Wesley is in LFS’s applied animal biology program. He enjoys his night gig as a bartender at a fancy cocktail bar in Gastown. Bartending is both his job and hobby. In the summer he likes to play tennis, hike, and patron all the great bars in Vancouver. He lives with his dog Kili. He is a German Shepherd dog, and likes sniffing, biting, scratching, and rubbing on trees, standard dog stuff.
The Groups’ Interests and Community Project:
Our group is interested in learning about Vancouver’s plastic bag use, and coming up with solutions to reduce non-reusable bags in Vancouver. We will be working in coordination with an engineer in Waste Reduction and Recovery and a Social Planner for Food Policy who work for the City of Vancouver. They have stated that plastic bag use is an issue that Vancouver would like to focus on. The current challenges are to reduce the purchase and use of compostable plastic products and to create public awareness on which products are accepted by the local organics processor. Ultimately, we would like to propose a solution to the city and to gain experience dealing with elected officials and policy making.
First Impressions:
We think that Asset-Based Community Development will be a great learning experience and an effective approach to take in helping to improve the current thinking around plastic use. Vancouver mayor, Greggor Robertson, is highly interested in making Vancouver the greenest city in the world by the year 2020. Initiatives such as city-wide composting are one step in achieving this goal. Transport of organic material from a household to the composting bin may involve the use of plastic or compostable bags which end up in the compost processing facility. The city has indicated that the use of these bags may be affecting the efficiency of the composting system. Compostable bags may be an asset that the city would like to expand upon, by reducing the use of plastic bags. Further investigation of the effects of compostable bags on compost processing facilities will need to be conducted.
We would like to take a closer look into how these bags effect the composting system and deliver our findings directly to the city. In addition to conducting research on the effects of bags in composting facilities in our region, we want to understand how other municipalities have implemented plastic bag bans, and what the effects of such policies have had within those municipalities. We hope to gain a thorough understanding of the current practices of plastic and compostable bag disposal of people living within Vancouver, research what is being done with regards to this topic in other cities, and put these together to suggest a plan for building on the positive changes that are already underway in Vancouver.