Rideau Canal Waterway - Waste Management


		Waste Management

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Waste Management
Waste management is a fancy name for a problem that most cottagers and rural residents face. What do I do with my garbage?

Depending on where you live on the Rideau, you either have garbage pickup or have to haul your garbage to the local dump. In most cases there is a charge for each bag of garbage (recycling is usually free). To reduce your costs and help out the environment, the simple solution is to reduce the amount of "garbage". We can do this through composting, recycling and garage sales.

Composting

Anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of household waste is compostable material. Composting is an easy and cheap way to get rid of much of the garbage you don't want to have hanging around your house or cottage. Even if you don't have a garden, the resulting compost soil can be used to enrich the soil on any part of your property.

There are a few easy steps to composting:

Get a composter. You can build one. Some of the links below show designs for home built composters. Alternatively you can buy a standard home composter, usually made of black plastic. Several of the local townships sell these at a reduced rate (check with your local municipal office)
Place it on a flat, well drained surface. Expose the soil (remove any grass or sod cover). Try to add a few inches of coarse material (chopped brush, straw) as your first layer.
Add your composting material. Items to add from your house include fruit, vegetable peelings, egg shells, and coffee grounds. Items not to add include meat, bones, fat, cheese, oils, and other materials that might attract pests and slow down the composting process.
Try to maintain a 30:1 carbon to nitrogen ratio. Kitchen waste alone will generally give you a 15:1 to 20:1 ratio. Ideally you want to add more carbon to the mix. Leaves (dry brown leaves), with a 60:1 ratio, make an ideal balance for kitchen waste. Adding some leaves to the composter every few weeks will keep your pile percolating. If you rake up your leaves in the fall, keep some bags of leaves to add to your composter. Alternatively just rake them off into piles that you can tap into as needed over the next year.
Aeration helps to speed up the composting process. Ideally, the pile should be turned every few weeks. In a small composter, just try to loosen it up, to let more oxygen into the mix.

Remember, composting can be as much or as little work as you want it to be. If your goal is just to get rid of kitchen waste in an environmentally friendly manner, then there is very little work involved. Just ignore the above work suggestions (carbon ratios, turning the pile) - your pile will still turn into soil over time.

If your goal is to quickly make the perfect composted soil for your garden, then it will require more work. You will have to watch the nitrogen/carbon ratio and aerate often.

Some composting problems with solutions:

Problem	Cause	Solution
Pile not heating up	Not enough nitrogen or pile too dry	If pile is dry, moisten it. If that doesn't work then add more nitrogen (grass clipping, kitchen scraps).
Compost smells bad	Not enough air or too wet	Turn the pile to aerate it. Add some dry material.
Compost is warm only in the middle	Pile is too small	Add more material to the pile (yard scraps are great).
Centre of pile is dry	Not enough water	Add water and turn the pile.

For more information on composting, have a look at some of these sites:

Composting at Home

Recycling

Most municipalities in the Rideau region offer recycling programs. An example is the Township of Rideau Lakes which maintains recycling bins for the following items:

Fibres

Newspapers and inserts
Boxboard
Magazines and catalogues
Household paper (ie. junk mail, writing paper, envelopes, etc.)
Poly-coated paperboard (ie. milk cartons, tetra paks, etc.)
Fine paper (i.e. photocopy, computer paper, post-it notes, etc.)
Telephone books
Kraft paper (ie. brown paper bags)

Containers

Metal food and beverage cans
Aluminum trays and foil
PET Plastic #1
High Density Polyethylene Plastic (#2) (ie. juice, shampoo, bleach bottles, etc.)
Polypropylene Plastics (#5) (ie. margarine, yogurt, cottage cheese containers, etc.)
Polystyrene Plastic (#6) (ie. plastic disposable plates, cups, cutlery, foam packaging, etc.)

Corrugated cardboard

There are several advantages to recycling.

First of all, in most areas, it's free. In fact in many areas it makes money for the municipality, which helps to keep your taxes down.
It keeps this material out of the dump. This makes the dump last longer which will have an impact on your future taxes.
It is good for the environment. Better to have this material recycled than buried in a landfill. Less new material is required for the products we like to use.
It makes life easier for you. This material, when separated from the regular garbage, is easy to store (it doesn't go bad). You can take it to the recycling centre at your convenience.

Garage Sales

What in the world do garage sales have to do with waste management? A lot of us have a tendency when we grow tired of something (that nouveau decor pink lamp we got as a wedding gift) to toss it into the garbage. So, it ends up taking up useless space in the dump. Often somebody else, if given the opportunity, will take the item and use it.

The problem the rural resident and cottager has, is that their location is often not an ideal spot to hold a garage sale. There are a couple of options.

Find a friend in a town or village who wants to hold a garage sale and see if you can add your stuff to their pile. It often helps the sale, since more items in a garage sale tend to attract more buyers.
Donate the items you don't want to a charitable organization that is holding a garage sale. Many church groups and other charitable organizations hold garage sales as fund raisers. Contact one of these to see if they will take your items.