Hello!

How did you dispose of your coffee cup this morning? What about the apple core from yesterday afternoon? And those plastic bags you took your groceries home in?

We hope your answer was that you recycled/composted all of the above, but if that isn’t what you did that’s okay too. Why may you ask? Because that is what we’re here to educate you on: waste diversion! Collectively, we are extremely passionate about the environment, the impact that waste has on natural spaces and wildlife, and doing our part to slow down climate change.

With all of us coming from different programs in the faculty of Land and Food Systems, it allows us to bring different perspectives and knowledge on the topic of waste diversion and ways to approach this project. This is our biggest strength, as a group, because it allows us to expand beyond the scope of our objectives and take into consideration all aspects of waste diversion.  

Together, we are interested in making an impact through our work on the “Put Waste In Its Place Zero Waste Station” project. Our ultimate goal is to design decals that will increase waste diversion when placed on bins in zero waste stations in Hillcrest Community Centre. If successful, this could then be adapted for use at numerous community centres to further increase the overall diversion rate in the city of Vancouver. Come follow our journey to make zero waste a reality for the City of Vancouver one community centre at a time!

Our Community Partners: The City of Vancouver and CityStudio

The “Put Waste In Its Place Zero Waste Station” project is a partnership between the City of Vancouver and CityStudio. CityStudio provides the means to connect university students, like ourselves, to cities (like Vancouver) and other community members and project partners. This helps all parties work together to create, design and launch innovative ideas. As a result, we are able to experiment with new and exciting concepts, collect data and see if our designs are making a difference in the community right away. The main goal of the “Put Waste In Its Place” program is to increase the diversion rate, which is the amount of waste that is being diverted away from the landfill to instead be recycled or composted. Although this is great for the environment, it is also a way to save taxpayer money. The idea behind it is this: it is expensive to take truckloads of waste to the landfill, but it is free to recycle and sometimes you can even make money from it too!

Project Objectives

For this term specifically, our team will be working with CityStudio and the City of Vancouver in developing three sets of decals to be placed on the lids of each of the recycling bins in the Zero Waste Station at Hillcrest Community Centre. This will be done to increase awareness of what is supposed to go into the bin in order to increase the overall diversion rate in the community centre. It could also work to decrease the need for the top placards, which are expensive to replace and broken easily in certain settings, like ice rinks for example. In the end, the main goal of the project is to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world by the year 2020, as part of the Greenest City Action Plan.

First Impressions

Before meeting with our community partners, CityStudio and the City of Vancouver, our first impression of the Zero Waste project was that it was going to be a challenging issue to tackle, especially since it is a city-wide implementation. However, after our first meeting with Jeanie Morton and Paul Gagnon and seeing how passionate they are about the project goals and objectives, we became more confident in building a project to work towards the Zero Waste goal. The most surprising aspect of our first meeting was learning how specific our project is. It was nicely described in a detailed and organized way to help us get our ideas rolling right away! In the first meeting we also learned a lot about the specifics of waste diversion from Paul Gagnon, our community partner from the City of Vancouver, including its current state in Vancouver. Currently, seventy-eight percent of waste in Vancouver is diverted from the landfill to instead be recycled or composted.  With this new knowledge and heightened awareness of the impact waste diversion has within our city, we have come to realize the importance of this project for the Vancouver Zero Waste goal. Through having two professionals in the field as mentors, it allows us, as students, to gain insight from them and build off of previous ideas from past groups who have participated in this project as well. This idea ties into a theme we have seen in both Ernesto Sirolli’s TED Talk and the Asset-Based Community Development Approach; that success does not occur individually, rather it is the result of teamwork from different members of the community (2012). We believe this statement wholeheartedly. As part of a diverse community, we can work together to bring different ideas and perspectives to the table for this project. For example, our community partners both focus on different outcomes within the Zero Waste project. CityStudio focuses mainly on the environmental impact it will have on the city, whereas the City of Vancouver focuses on the economic impact. Because both community partners bring different perspectives to this project, it allows us (as students) to build a relationship that allows for “mutually beneficial problem solving within our community” (Mathie and Cunningham, 2003).

Food Justice Connection

Our project does not directly relate to food justice, in terms of how it is commonly defined as “remodelling the current food system and eliminating disparities and inequities” that restrict access to good, healthy food and limit choice in food (Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010: ix). That being said, diverting waste through composting can be extremely beneficial in growing food in many different settings. This in turn can work towards making healthy food available to more people with a lower income through gardening, as seeds for fruits and vegetables are rather inexpensive and tend to have a high yield for a small quantity.

Although the act of consumers repurposing and reducing food waste is important and can be done quite simply, the problem is much more extended to the capitalist system of overproduction, thus results to injustice. Ultimately, food waste problems cannot be directly resolved just by changing the consumer’s habits, but political transformation and surplus reduction can make an impact. This potentially leads to more convenient access to a better food system that will provide for the community for a lifetime (Crawford, 2016).

Therefore, we believe that Vancouver’s Zero Waste project plays a significant part in achieving the goal to become the greenest city in the world. The government itself, as well as its collaboration with CityStudio, universities and other major establishments in the city can effectively implement the policy. In addition, all parties involved can then encourage the rest of the community to educate themselves about the importance of waste diversion and management. The power of the government’s jurisdiction together with its collaborators will lead the rest of the community in informing them about sustainable alternatives that will bring justice back in the food system.

Within the next couple weeks, we will be arranging and conducting our first naturalistic observational study at Hillcrest Community Centre. We are all looking forward for this first visit!

Stay tuned for more to come….

 

 

References:

CityStudio. (n.d.) What We Do. Retrieved January 23, 2017 from: http://citystudiovancouver.com

Crawford, A. (2016). Food Waste: A Food Justice Opportunity? [Web log message]. Retrieved from https://foodfirst.org/food-waste-a-food-justice-opportunity/

Faculty of Land and Food Systems. Land, Food, and Community II. (n.d.) City of Vancouver – Put Waste in its Place: The Zero Waste Station Challenge C. Retrieved January 23, 2017 from: http://lfs350.landfood.ubc.ca/community-projects/2017-winter-projects/city-of-vancouver-put-waste-in-its-place-the-zero-waste-station-challenge-c/

Gottlieb, R. & Joshi, A. (2010). Food justice. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Mathie, A., & Cunningham, G. (2003). From clients to citizens: Asset-based Community Development as a strategy for community-driven development. Development in Practice, 13(5), 474–486. Retrieved through the UBC Library Website.

Sirolli, E. (2012) Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen! [Youtube] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXsLtHqfdM&t=78s.