Rossland students took a waste field trip on Tuesday to find out what happens to Rossland’s waste.
Jessica Williams of Wildsight took Bridget O’Malley’s Grade 5 and 6 class from Rossland Summit School (RSS) on the field trip as part of Wildsight’s Beyond Recycling program.
Williams meets with the students once a week throughout the year to teach them about living more sustainably. She recently had the students complete a waste audit, which is how they discovered that 85 to 95 per cent of the garbage at the school was made up of plastics.
The goal of the field trip was for the students to learn more about how they might be able to set up recycling for plastics in their schools, while also learning about what happens to Rossland’s waste.
Their first stop was at the Alpine Group Recycling Centre where Don Soukeroff, interior manager, gave them a tour of the facility.
O’Malley’s students asked Soukeroff questions about how they might be able to recycle plastic containers in their school, and he told them to make sure to rinse containers before recycling them, to help keep odours down.
The students were also accompanied by Tim Dueck, solid waste program coordinator for the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary (RDKB), on their field trip.
He explained that the bales of compacted cardboard that leave Alpine are usually shipped to pulp mills, while the containers are shipped to a sorting facility in Surrey, where the different types of plastic and other materials are separated so they can be recycled.
Dueck warns that people shouldn’t combine their plastics — like stuffing smaller plastics into a yogourt container — because the machines won’t be able to read it properly and it will wind up in the trash. He also mentioned that bottle caps can be hard to process and that it’s better to take them to the bottle depot than to mix them with your curbside container pick up.
Dueck also reminded the students about the three Rs — reduce, reuse and recycle — reminding them that the three Rs are ordered that way for a reason, and the first step should be to reduce waste, then to reuse what you can, with recycling as, ideally, the final option. Though Dueck also mentioned the materials like candy wrappers or chip bags that can’t be recycled, which he said are referred to as residuals.
From Alpine, the students were to continue on to the McKelvey Creek Regional Landfill, which is also the home of a Recycle B.C. Depot. Then following a lunch break at Trail’s Gyro Park, they were headed to the Trail Return-It Bottle Depot to learn about the recycling services offered there.
