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Tackling waste in Metro Vancouver - one cucumber at a time

People who attended Metro Vancouver’s recent Zero Waste Conference are now in-the-know about why you should shrink-wrap a cucumber and how to eat like a king without spending a dime.

People who attended Metro Vancouver’s recent Zero Waste Conference are now in-the-know about why you should shrink-wrap a cucumber and how to eat like a king without spending a dime.

Hundreds of delegates descended on the Vancouver Convention Centre on Oct. 16 to attend the Zero Waste Conference. In an attempt to be as paperless as possible, organizers developed a web app that included the program, speaker biographies and links to resources for participants.

“There was a video feed from Britain. I was impressed – the video feed was so clear,” said Coun. Betty McIntosh, one of several city representatives who attended the conference. “It was in real time. You could ask questions and get an immediate answer.”

Several city employees and council members attended the conference, as did representatives of groups as varied as Fraser Health, River Market and the New Westminster Chamber of Commerce.

“I went on behalf of the chamber because of course there is going to be implications for business. A business would need to reduce its waste to reduce its costs,” said Cori-Lynn Germiquet, the chamber’s executive director. “I went there specifically to learn how businesses in New Westminster can apply these zero waste reduction policies to their operations with the overall goal, of course, of reducing their costs.”

Germiquet said some “eye-opening” information was presented during the Zero Waste Conference. She was shocked to learn that two million water bottles are used every five minutes in the United States.

“I did learn about the volume of garbage that’s generated here in our Metro Vancouver area,” she said. “I was taken aback by it – 43 kilograms per second every day.”

Not everything that ends up in the garbage is true waste, as pointed out by Grant Baldwin and Jen Rustemeyer, who offered a sneak peak of their upcoming documentary Just Eat It. A Food Waste Story.

Germiquet said the couple lived for an entire year on discarded food. The food didn’t come from dumpsters but from restaurants and grocery stores that were discarding it because it had reached its best-before date – but was still perfectly edible.

“They ate like kings for a year,” she said.

One Vancouver restaurant explained how it’s managed to become 100 per cent waste-free.

Jennifer Lukianchuk, the city’s environmental coordinator, and Kristian Davis, the city’s supervisor of solid waste and recycling, were among the attendees at the conference.

In recent years, the City of New Westminster has introduced a number of environmental initiatives, including expanded recycling programs and food waste recycling. Earlier this year, New Westminster was a finalist in the Waste and Recycling News’ Green City Awards in the small-sized community category.

The reason behind shrink-wrapping a cucumber? As the book Why Shrink-wrap a Cucumber? The Complete Guide to Environmental Packaging points out it can actually reduce waste by extending the freshness of a cucumber – so it doesn’t end up as waste.