The COVID-19 pandemic has had numerous environmental consequences, including impacts on municipal waste management systems. Changes in consumption and waste disposal patterns and behaviours during the lockdown period have produced new challenges for solid waste management and waste diversion activities. This paper develops a conceptual model that reflects short-term changes in waste flows from households that are due to COVID-19 disruptions, focusing on the case of multi-residential buildings in Toronto, Canada. Multi-residential buildings are of interest because they differ from single family homes in several key ways that can produce some slightly different impacts of COVID-19 on waste flows and practices. Primary research for the study included interviews with 19 staff, residents and property managers of ten multi-residential buildings. All of the research took place while Toronto was still in partial-lockdown. Analysis of the interviews revealed five themes around the impact of COVID-19: (1) changes in garbage, recycling and organics flows, (2) new health and safety concerns, (3) changes in reuse and reduction practices, (4) changes in special waste and deposit-return bottle collections, and (5) changes in waste diversion and reduction education. Given the time frame of our study, we recognize these as short-term impacts and call for future research to determine how many of the changes are likely to perpetuate over the medium and longer term.
Waste diversion targets are a common characteristic of municipal climate change mitigation plans because about two-thirds of residential waste sent to landfills is degradable and thus contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper focuses on the challenge of achieving waste diversion targets in multi-residential buildings because their diversion rates are much lower than those for single-family homes. A case study of 15 high-rise condominium and cooperative housing buildings compares modes of governance by the City of Toronto and by multi-residential buildings to address waste diversion challenges. City responses to the challenges included mandatory building standards making waste diversion as convenient as garbage disposal, voluntary standards for in-suite storage of recyclables and organics, phase-in of organics collection and pay-as-you-throw collection fees, and delivery of promotion and education programs. For buildings, the responses were fines for poor-quality sorting, conversion of the garbage chute to an organics chute, the delivery of education material to residents, and monitoring bin capacity. Despite these initiatives, Toronto is very unlikely to meet its target of diverting 70% of residential waste away from disposal in landfill by 2030. Seven actions are recommended to increase the rate of diversion. POLICY RELEVANCERecommended actions for Toronto and other municipalities facing similar waste diversion deficits in the multi-residential sector include: studying the potential for converting garbage chutes to organic chutes, assessing the effectiveness of different chute systems, modifying waste collection service agreements or city bylaws to incorporate obligations for promotion and education around waste diversion, revising building standards to require more space for diversion facilities inside buildings, adopting voluntary building standards for building operations, and advocating with higher levels of government to regulate packaging complexity.
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