Twice a year, teams at MEC stores don coveralls and jump in the dumpsters to do a waste audit. Seth from MEC Calgary gives us a breakdown of what kind of stuff they found out in their latest audit, and why MEC does these things in the first place.
I love Calgary’s crisp October mornings. The leaves have started falling, the air’s chilly (but not too cold for cycling tights), the sun cuts through the fog along the river, and you can see the mountains.
Basically, it’s a great time to put on some coveralls and jump in the MEC Calgary dumpster.
We conduct waste audits at each store twice a year by getting dirty and inspecting the material that makes it into our dumpsters. As an organization, MEC achieves a 96% diversion rate, but we’re always interested in finding ways to improve (and whether our diversion systems are actually working). The process for auditing the waste is pretty straightforward: jump in the dumpster, take the material out, sort it, and weigh it.
It’s not a glamorous job.
We’re pretty lucky in the Calgary store though. We have a fairly robust composting program, so a lot of the organics that can really funk up the bin are not stewing and liquefying and getting ready to spill all over us. But the main point of this program isn’t to look for ways to congratulate ourselves – we’re looking for what isn’t working so that we can address it.
This year, we weighed close 80lb. of material, and about 87% of the material we pulled out of the dumpster was what could be labelled “legitimate” garbage. That is to say, items that couldn’t be recycled by any current technology or in a way that makes environmental sense (for example: bicycle tubes can be recycled but they need to shipped out of country in order to do so which results in a huge net carbon footprint).
So what does that really mean? Well, of the waste that we aren’t already diverting from the landfill, about 87% is out of our current control. But that means that there’s still another 13% of our store’s waste that could be diverted from the landfill. Clearly some of our systems aren’t functioning perfectly. But rather than get discouraged, we hunker down and come up with action plans.
One thing we’re implementing in Calgary is placing recycling stations in more prominent locations. For example, there’s been an increase in the amount of shipping that we take care of in our store, so we’re bringing in dedicated recycling bins for that purpose. Having the system close at hand makes it easier to use, especially when you’re neck deep in pre-holiday orders. We’re also working with our recycling service to create clearer signage to reduce the potential of contamination in the recycling bins.
Dumpster diving isn’t just an excellent opportunity to see where our systems can be improved (or a great excuse to wear huge coveralls and muck about in the trash), but it can also raise our awareness of what legitimate garbage we’re producing. Perhaps there’s a way for us to reduce (the first and loftiest of the “R”s) the material we’re producing? We take note of items that appear in the dumpster in great quantities (for example, sticker backers from bubble envelopes and silica packs from shipping products all over the world) and do our best to avoid them if we can.
If we take a look at the impact that we can have on our overall diversion rate – the 13% of illegitimate waste we find in our dumpster only equates to an additional 0.5% on MEC’s overall waste diversion – it may not seem like it will make a huge difference. But we’re not looking at scoring huge numbers – we just want to make sure that we reduce our impact on the earth as much as we can. And we’re going to continue pushing forward, one waste audit at a time.