Oxford County seeking proposals for zero waste initiative
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Oxford County is seeking proposals for its zero waste initiative.
Two requests for proposals (RFP) are being made to advance the county’s zero waste plan in the community. The county is looking for a detailed audit of Oxford’s current waste stream and an assessment of resource recovery technologies.
Manager of strategic initiatives Jay Heaman said the county needs to understand what composes waste going into Salford landfill, as well as what’s leaving the county from the industrial sector.
“The idea is to have a complete understand of the composition of the waste resource,” Heaman said. “That information will feed into the second (proposal)… The goal is to identify all of the waste and find the most appropriate measures to reduce and recycle as much of that waste as possible.”
Heaman said the technology review will need the audit to help establish what technologies will be needed, making the to proposals linked.
“Right now the options are to put (waste) in the ground, that’s definitely the cheapest option and it’s definitely not sustainable,” Heaman said. “The other is to burn it, and that’s not really considered a long-term goal and there are a lot of issues with that. It’s really all about doing the heavy lifting to find a way of reducing it in the first place and whatever we do create can be repurposed without having to be landfilled or burned.”
The RFPs are separate, but will be running concurrently with a deadline of 12 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 19.
Heaman said they expect the audit activity to begin next year, which will inform the technology review that is expected to start later that year.
“We expect this to take up the bulk of 2017,” Heaman said.
The county is also going to continue public consultations efforts, as the Zero Waste Oxford committee will be working with the community moving forward.
Heaman also said that the public should read the Waste Free Ontario Act to help understand the county’s Zero Waste plan.
“It’s a really well thought out document and a fairly short read,” he said. “It lays out the importance of zero waste in the province, and it really does relate back to energy in a lot of ways and to the issues of climate change.”
The Waste Free Ontario Act can be found on the provincial government’s website at www.ontla.on.ca/web/bills/bills_detail.do?locale=en&BillID=3598. Oxford County’s Zero Waste plan can be found on the Future Oxford website at www.futureoxford.ca/General/SustainabilityPlan/index.htm.