City buries composting project
Cardboard separated during dump fire covers non-profit's hard work
Casey Lessard
Northern News Services
Saturday, June 13, 2015
IQALUIT
Visibly frustrated, Jim Little - the man who since 2002 has driven a pickup truck around town to pick up compost - came to Iqaluit city council June 9 wanting answers.
Composting advocate Jim Little expressed his frustration at the June 9 Iqaluit city council meeting, telling councillors the Bill Mackenzie Humanitarian Society's composting site was basically destroyed by public works employees due to the 2014 dump fire. - Casey Lessard/NNSL photo
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"What's bringing me here tonight with a certain amount of sadness is the destruction and damage to our composting site," Little told councillors, referring to the pile he and other volunteers had spent years and thousands of dollars building at the end of the landfill site. "I want to know if the city is going to take responsibility for what they've done."
In January 2014, the city said it supported composting as a waste management initiative. Little cited statistics showing more than 30 per cent of waste can be diverted through composting.
It's one of the reasons that, working at a 2,200-square meter plot, Little and Bill Mackenzie Humanitarian Society (BMHS) volunteers had over the years put down a pad with a liner, built up the soil, and brought a pile of compost materials from 100 families to the point of supporting the growth of native plants.
"The plants just sort of moved in," he said. "You couldn't stop it."
The positive results encouraged Little to think that some day in the near future, the society could build a barn-like structure to house the compost for the entire city, and he might be able to turn his 13 years of volunteer experience into a full-time job.
"We spent a lot of money developing a business plan to go to the GN (Government of Nunavut) so we could become sustainable, we were hoping to grow our project from 100 families upward, and approach the city to see when they wanted to take it over and do collections."
But by last summer, with the city dealing with the dump fire, public works employees needed to find places for waste materials under a new separation regime. The city approached Little for permission to temporarily pile cardboard and paper waste on the space leased by BMHS but not on the compost pile.
Little learned the hard way what they say about best intentions.
Forced to leave the territory for personal reasons, Little returned to find the fire out and the compost pile buried deep under cardboard and paper. Other BMHS assets were damaged or destroyed.
"The fire had been long out, they had moved the incinerator onto our site, our concrete pad completely buried, the mature compost pile is still buried. We couldn't get to our active compost pile until two weeks ago. Heavy equipment is going to cut through our membrane if they haven't already. I go over there and just get sick to my stomach."
The site also housed a lot of building materials and a boiler for the planned building.
"It was kind of messy but we knew what we had," he said.
The city did not help secure the site, he said, and now people are piling garbage there because they "think it's a dump," while others are helping themselves to the society's building materials.
"Are you guys going to take responsibility for this or not?" he asked council. "I need to know."
Coun. Stephen Mansell said council will have to find out what had happened, and asked for administration to look into it.
"There's not a lot nice about the current landfill," Mansell said. "One of the positives that was going on there was composting. And now you can't do it."
Newly-hired public works director Matthew Hamp took some time to speak with Little as the meeting progressed.
Coun. Terry Dobbin pointed out that the society's lease had run out when the situation arose, and the city was in a pinch.
"There's very limited land space," Dobbin said, noting his desire to see the problem fixed.
"It was just an unfortunate incident and it shouldn't have happened but I wasn't aware of it until I went to your Bill Mackenzie AGM (in April). We just need to rectify this."
