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Earth Week 2013 Managing a cleaner dump Landfill boss has a vision for an efficient, safe and environmentally-friendly facilitySimon Whitehouse Northern News Services Published Friday, April 19, 2013
Peter Houweling, the clean-cut, young head of the solid waste facility, sees himself at a "crossroads" in the city's waste collection history. Houweling is overseeing the winding down of the current Highway 4 landfill, now in its final years. The site stopped taking residential garbage within the last year, and a new cell next door at a rock quarry has begun taking bales of solid waste.
"It has been awesome," said Houweling of his job since being hired last September. "With recycling and waste management, I think people have realized how much more important it is for the future of Earth and the well-being of our community. I play a big part in that and it is exciting."
Residents will get to meet Houweling and hear about his work as landfill boss at an Earth Week public forum at Northern United Place.
He told Yellowknifer his overall objective is to run a cost-effective facility with low environmental impact and high waste diversion. He said he sees his role as setting an example for users by making the site environmentally-friendly, safe and accessible.
"At the end of the day, our responsibility is to educate and make our site user-friendly, safe and easy to use with proper signage and organized," he said in an interview last week.
"If we want people to respect our site and keep it clean, we have to keep it clean in the first place."
A big part of this clean-up effort involves plans to revamp the three-cell salvaging area with a "transfer station." With the removal of the tire dumping area, there are plans this summer to expand the three cells into five and provide signage indicating where salvageable material can be specifically dumped.
"Right now everybody just throws stuff into the cells," said city councillor Rebecca Alty, who is also the solid waste management committee chair. "Not only do they throw their salvageable stuff, but they throw their actual garbage like Kleenexes and stuff that you don't salvage."
The solid waste facility is part of a continued effort by the city to make a greener community, along with a soil remediation program, a recycling center, and a scrap metal recycling and electronic waste collection program.
Perhaps most notable is the central composting program, run in a partnership between the city and Ecology North. It began last year as a pilot program, and the city was given a sustainability award in February in the waste category by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities for this unique relationship.
This year again the solid waste facility has three large windrows of waste in various degrees of compost breakdown. While Ecology North has a compost co-ordinator visiting the site twice a week to direct when and how to turn the piles, the city provides manpower and equipment to carry out the tasks.
"I guess from last year to this year, we are really focusing on transitioning from the pilot project to a program and that is kind of the goal," said Ecology North program director Dawn Tremblay. "We want to celebrate the award and everything we have accomplished by the pilot project. We are also looking to the future and the whole longevity of the program."
Helping to shape how Yellowknifers think of the landfill and where they leave their waste is a crucial part of how the municipality is trying to make the community more sustainable, said Houweling.
"What we would like is to have our solid waste facility be a place that is presentable, lasts forever and looks good," he said. "It is a place of putting money back into the economy, reducing the risk of damaging the environment. It is a positive place and I think the word 'dump' can come across as negative," he said.
- See related story page A19
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