YELLOWKNIFE - At the Yellowknife Solid Waste Facility, among piles of garbage and throngs of birds, an extensive (and expensive) study is underway.

Four workers from Gartner Lee Ltd. are hard at work, getting to the bottom of what Yellowknifers throw away in the $50,000 Solid Waste Composition Study.

Equipped for your average industrial chemical spill, the workers diligently separate the trash into its component pieces - organics, metals, medical waste, recyclables and more. They are measuring, weighing and recording what they find, as they have done at waste facilities around the country.

On the ground, Vancouver resident Mary Jane O'Donnell seems to be running the show, and is happy to explain the particulars.

"It's amazing what a wasteful society we are," she says as she looks at a waist-high bag of recyclable cans and bottles, the result of two days of digging.

The group is taking 25 "samples" from the dump, nearly 3,000 kilograms of trash in total, to figure out just what we're throwing away.

And while she clearly isn't liking what she finds - large amounts of recyclable, compostable and reusable items - she said it doesn't surprise her.

"For a community with a relatively new recycling program, it's not terribly shocking," she says.

The study was approved in March, after a strong debate at city council nearly had it scrapped at the last minute.

"I have a problem with over-studying a problem," councillor David Wind said at the time.

"I think we have a handle on what's in our garbage."

Out of the sight (and smell) of the study, project manager Karen Asp said the project, in figuring out what people throw away, can demonstrate how waste can be diverted away from the dump.

"It's challenging to do," she says of the work on the ground.

"You can get into some pretty yucky and icky stuff."

The field study portion of the project wraps up today, while the results will be released at the end of July.