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Hello, I'm Randy Park with the City of Winnipeg Water & Waste Department.
I'm here at the Brady Road Landfill to show you what goes on here every day.
Opened in 1973, this is the City's only active landfill. Just south of the city, the area
available for landfilling is nearly 790 hectares. This is larger than the neighbourhood of River
Heights.
Every day, an average of 155 garbage trucks go through the gates at Brady, dropping off
over 1000 tonnes of waste. Over 105,000 small loads are also dropped off every year. Altogether,
this equals more than 400,000 tonnes a year of garbage.
A by-product of all this garbage is methane gas. More than 14,000 tonnes of this greenhouse
gas is given off every year by the landfill and this is equivalent to annual emissions
from approximately 70,000 passenger vehicles.
Another by-product of the landfill is leachate. Leachate is a harmful liquid produced by moisture
filtering down through garbage. Six tanker trucks full of leachate are collected every
day and treated at our wastewater treatment plant.
Almost one half of our garbage is organic waste. Every year, we throw out approximately
140,000 tonnes of organic waste. Only a small portion of this is currently composted.
Some of this garbage is recycled.
Scrap metal and tires are collected at Brady and recycled.
A methane gas capture and destruction system is planned for 2011.
What else can we do?
Do we really need to continue throwing this much away?
How do we reduce the volume of garbage going to the landfill?
What do you think we should do?