Mr. Broderick’s grade five class had an up close look at The Golden Landfill and The Golden Bottle Depot this past fall. Carmen Fennell, Waste Reduction Facilitator from the Columbia Shuswap Regional District was our fantastic tour guide.
The first thing Carmen taught us after getting off the bus was that the landfill is no longer called a dump, because many materials are diverted from being buried in the landfill as possible. This is done through recycling and reusing. Our first stop on our tour was to the marshalling area. Here we saw large piles of metal, mattresses, shingles, fridges and drywall.
Some things we learned about:
500 mattresses a year go to Calgary to be recycled
200 fridges a year are dropped off for recycling
shingles are recycled in Armstrong and used to pave roads
drywall is recycled in Alberta. The gypsum gets made into new drywall and the paper gets reused for animal bedding.
metal gets recycled in the lower mainland
Next we looked at the active face. Then we learned about the re-use shed and weighed ourselves on the scale.
At The Golden Bottle Depot, two surprising things we learned were that our paper recycling gets sent to China for recycling and that two pallets of TV’s a week are sent to be recycled. That’s 24-30 TV’s a week from Golden!
This was an eye opening field trip that left us all seriously thinking about reducing, reusing and recycling!
