Rolling through Skidegate Heights in a brand-new recycling truck last Wednesday, Filene Mussell held up a pizza-sauce bottle without a speck of food inside.
It was day two of Skidegate’s pickup recycling service — a first for Haida Gwaii — and Mussell was impressed.
“We haven’t had a speck of anything in any of the containers so far, which is unheard of,” she said.
A waste reduction coordinator for IZWTAG, the Indigenous Zero Waste Technical Advisory Group, Mussell and two colleagues visited Haida Gwaii last week to help with the Skidegate launch and a similar pickup recycling service that Old Massett Village Council will launch in the next week or two.
Clean containers and dry cardboard are two secrets to a well-run recycling program, Mussell said, noting that Recycle BC only allows a three per cent contamination rate for containers.
A single peanut-butter jar with a few smears inside could get a whole batch of recyclables thrown out, and the recycle depot that missed it during their quality check gets stuck paying the tipping fees.
Frank Russ, recycling champion for the Skidegate Band Council, said people were excited when more than 300 big blue recycling bins started rolling out to households across the village.
Inside each of the big bins are three brightly coloured bags: blue for rigid containers, red for paper and cardboard, and yellow for everything else, including milk containers and flexible plastics such as shopping bags, even shrink wrap and potato-chip bags.
“People are looking forward to recycling things and keeping them out of landfills,” Russ said.
“If we can all change something together, it will be better for all of us.”
From left, Frank Russ and Dennis Hans pick up recyclables from a Skidegate blue bin with sorted blue, red, and yellow bags inside. (Andrew Hudson photo)
The Skidegate recycling crew will run regular recycling pickups on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, bringing most recyclables to the transfer station in Daajing Giids.
Any containers that can earn a cash deposit will go up to the Masset Return-It Depot, and the money collected returns to the Skidegate Band Council. Mussell said other First Nations have used the money for community causes such as travel expenses for youth sports teams.
Once the Skidegate program has been running for a while, Russ said they will organize special pick-ups days for small appliances and electronics.
Making sure batteries get safely recycled is another key goal of the program — the Islands Landfill north of Port Clements had a significant fire in August, apparently sparked by some batteries that wound up in the trash.
Russ said IZWTAG has offered helpful tips and training on the ins-and-outs of B.C.’s several different recycling stewardship programs, as well as technical help installing community-scale compost machines in Old Massett and Skidegate.
A door-to-door compost program is expected to start in Old Massett later this year after a leak issue gets fixed at the new composting facility.
A similar door-to-door compost pickup program is expected to start in Skidegate sometime in 2025.
