"You use to be able to walk in here," says Ken Petherick, the operations manager at Coquitlam Centre as he opens the door to a room jammed with green-waste carts.
But ever since the mall began collecting organic materials from customers at the food court, the green waste sorting area located in the bowels of the building has been packed with bins.
Now, instead of three to five carts collected two or three times a week, Petherick has the waste-haulers coming almost daily and carrying away eight to 12 bins at a time.
"We didn't anticipate as much separation than what we've been able to put out of it," he says during a tour of the mall. "There has been so much product that we are actively looking at going from toters to a compactor."
Coquitlam Centre has always provided organic waste collection for employees and tenants at the mall. But a month ago, the 12 garbage cans at the food court were barricaded and customers were asked to take their trays to a sorting station.
There, staff separate the waste into bottles and cans, plus regular garbage and organics, which includes most paper products.
At first, Petherick said, there was a bit of a learning curve as confused customers didn't know what to make of the changes. But in the last few weeks, there has been a dramatic change and most people seem to understand what the mall staff is trying to accomplish.
"It was interesting watching the public the first couple of days," he said. "They were like 'What do I do?' all of a sudden. But they have adapted quite nicely."
Petherick does not foresee a time when mall patrons will be relied upon to sort their own materials, as has been the case with garbage and recycling in some public places in the past.
The modifications Coquitlam Centre has made to its waste collection processes are in anticipation of regulatory changes at Metro Vancouver, which is implementing strict fines for material that is not properly separated. All it takes is one careless customer, says Petherick, and the mall could have to pay big bucks.
"There is a six-month grace period, then it just gets tougher from there," he said. "That is why we wanted to get a jump on this and get ahead of it."
Petherick also noted some other drawbacks to the changes. The mall is taking on larger staffing costs to collect trays and sort the material, and the compactor it is contemplating purchasing likely won't be cheap either.
But Deborah Stetz, Coquitlam Centre's marketing director, says the reality is that expectations of how waste is handled in the region are changing.
The mall's tenants have approximately 2,500 employees and thousands of customers come through its doors each week - roughly the size of a small town, she said. That means that a few behaviour changes people can undertake while they are at Coquitlam Centre can make a dramatic difference, Stetz added.
"It is our commitment to being sustainable," she said. "We are constantly brainstorming ideas to be more sustainable and deliver better customer experiences for our tenants, or the customers or the staff in the mall."
@GMcKennaTC
SO FAR, SO GOOD
Two months have passed since Metro Vancouver imposed its organics ban across the region.
So how are Tri-City residents faring with the new disposal order for food scraps?
Not too bad, say managers at Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody city halls.
Most residents in single-family homes are now used to the separate green can program, where both food and yard waste are disposed of. While Coquitlam began a green can program several years ago for single-family homeowners and Port Moody has been collecting divided waste in houses and townhomes since 2011, Port Coquitlam, which pioneered green waste pickup in the region, last year rolled out a new waste collection service to cover multi-family complexes and started a 10-week pilot green waste project for a few commercial and industrial sites.
Still, while organics collection appears to be on track, there have been some hiccups.
In Coquitlam, where organics are now collected weekly at single-family homes, the city no longer allows plastic bags - or cans without lids - to be put out with organics or trash. Port Coquitlam commercial and industrials businesses have also called for more frequent collection than residences. And questions have also arisen about how to keep cans clean and how to get customers to separate food themselves. As well, some residential stratas have voiced concerns about pick-up frequency and lack of space for cart storage.
In Port Moody, city staff have fielded at least a call a day about the organics ban.
Still, unlike in Vancouver, none of the cities is reporting pest nuisances.
But despite the somewhat rosy picture in the Tri-Cities so far, the outlook may change in four months when Metro cracks down on the organics ban ban. Starting July 1, the agency will enforce its order by levying fines for food dumped in the trash.
For more information on the Metro Vancouver organics ban, visit rcbc.ca/metrovan-organics-ban.
@jwarrenTC
