Zero Waste Challenge

The Montreal Borough of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie will implement the Zero Waste Challenge, a customized program to reduce waste from 50 volunteer households at the source. The project will include a communication campaign and a Web site to inform the general public about the project and encourage citizens to reduce the amount of household waste they generate. The project is inspired by the zero waste concept, a movement that is gaining ground in Quebec and in the communities of Roubaix and Miramas in France where the concept has been rolled out. The 50 participating households will be provided with diagnostics at the beginning of the project to assess their consumption habits and identify the waste that can easily be reduced and recovered. Based on individual meetings with a zero-waste-lifestyle specialist, the participants will be able to set their own garbage reduction and recycling objectives. They will also be asked to weigh their garbage bags, recycling buckets and food waste bins on a scale equipped with a hook. This data will be used to understand the weight changes in the three household waste collection streams and monitor recycling progress in terms of weight and percentage of recovered waste. The Borough can then assess whether there has been a waste weight transfer or whether the total amounts have decreased in each collection stream. The expected project results will be: 1. Reduce the amount of waste (garbage) per participant by 30% to 50%, which is the equivalent of: a. An average garbage reduction of 109 to 181 kg / person / year based on the current average in the borough (in 2016, Rosemont residents generated 362 kg / person / year of waste (garbage, recyclables and organics). 63% of this material ended up in landfill. b. A garbage reduction of 10.3 to 17.2 tonnes for the 50 participating households, considering the borough average of 1.9 people per household. 2. Achieve a 60% recovery rate for waste from the participating households. For the borough, in the long term, the project could reduce garbage by 16,390 tonnes with a recycling rate of 60%. The project is aligned with metropolitan and municipal waste management plans and uses the 4R-D (reduce, reuse, recycle, recover and disposal) approach. The project’s overall goal is to make borough citizens leaders in waste reduction at source and reuse and to test an innovative solution that could inspire other municipalities in Canada. The Borough of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie would like to repeat the experiment over the years, with modifications and improvements based on the previous years’ lessons learned. (Project description from original funding application)