Public consultations kick off Thursday on the city's plan to cut 70 per cent of garbage sent to landfills by 2025 and 85 per cent by 2030.

Can Montreal become a zero-waste city by 2030?

“Yes, if we invest the resources we need to achieve our goals,” says Karel Ménard, director of the Front commun québécois pour une gestion écologique des déchets.

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On Thursday, Montreal’s standing committee on the environment opens public consultations on the city’s plan to eliminate 70 per cent of the garbage it sends to landfills by 2025 and 85 per cent by 2030. The ecological group is among some 50 organizations, businesses and individuals scheduled to give their views.

The city’s blueprint on reducing waste calls for expanding compost pickup to businesses, schools and apartment buildings with six or more units; banning types of plastic that are hard to recycle; and donating unsold and discarded clothing instead of dumping it in the trash.

Currently, each Montrealer produces an average of 465 kilograms of waste yearly, according to numbers from 2018. The city aims to reduce that to 399 kilograms in five years.

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“The goal is to reduce waste at the source. We need to avoid producing garbage,” Ménard said.

The plan calls for a 10-per-cent reduction in the trash Montrealers discard by 2025 and a 20-per-cent reduction by 2030.

In October, Mayor Valérie Plante was among world mayors who committed at a meeting in Copenhagen of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) to move toward zero waste by reducing garbage and increasing recycling, composting and reuse of discarded materials.

Zero waste is based on the idea of a circular economy, where virtually everything is reused, recycled or composted instead of being sent to landfill.

The concept marks a departure from previous efforts in that it seeks to reduce consumption at the source rather than only concerning itself with what happens to items once they are discarded, Ménard said.

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For example, manufacturers and fast-food chains need to take responsibility for the excessive amounts of packaging they produce, grocery stores and restaurants need to stop throwing unsold food in the garbage, and clothing manufacturers need to change the fast-fashion culture that encourages people to change their wardrobes every few months, he said.

“They have to be made responsible. They have to develop awareness,” he said.

The city’s five-year plan calls for gradually prohibiting grocery stores from throwing out unsold food and banning the slashing and discarding of unsold clothing by garment manufacturers and retailers.

It also calls for saving construction materials when buildings are demolished and for some of those materials to be reused in new projects.

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Single-use drink bottles would be banned in city-owned buildings and more public drinking fountains would be installed.

In recent decades, Montreal has encouraged recycling by providing huge bins where citizens toss a mishmash of paper, plastic, metal and glass, Ménard said. But the decision by China and other Asian countries to reject poorly sorted and contaminated recyclables means we have to rethink what goes into the bin, Ménard said.

“You think it’s going to be recycled, but the glass is so contaminated that it isn’t recycled,” he said.

People often throw yogurt cups in recycling, but there is no market for that type of plastic, so they usually end up in landfills, he said.

“It’s not consumers’ fault. It’s confusing for everyone,” Ménard said.

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Inconsistent rules in different municipalities about what can be recycled, the lack of a secondary market for much of what we throw in the green bin and contamination by broken glass have all contributed to the recycling crisis, he said.

“We made a mistake by emphasizing quantity instead of quality,” he said.

Guidelines on what can be recycled must be more consistent and local markets must be developed for recycled materials, he said.

The Quebec government is expected to announce deposits on wine bottles this winter, which would greatly increase the amount of glass that is recycled, Ménard said. Currently, Quebec and Manitoba are the only provinces that do not have deposits on wine bottles, he said.

Banning door-to-door distribution of advertising flyers would also cut the quantity of paper and plastic bags dumped in bins, he added. Montreal recently held consultations on that issue.

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On Wednesday, the Plante administration announced it will also launch consultations on food waste. The announcement comes after more than 15,000 citizens signed a petition to force the city to hold hearings on the issue.

Laurence Lavigne Lalonde, the executive-committee member responsible for ecological transition and resiliency, welcomed the citizen initiative, noting that eliminating food waste is an important component of its zero-waste plan.

“We have to make sure that we find solutions so that we don’t waste food anymore because it obviously has a financial cost, but it also has a very significant environmental cost,” she said at the weekly executive-committee meeting.

The dates for the consultations on food waste have not yet been announced.