Donald
Teuma-Castelletti
BRISTOL Nov. 23, 2017
The MRC Pontiac hosted two speakers from Enviro Educ-Action at the Pine Lodge in Bristol last Thursday, where attendees had the opportunity to learn how they can get onboard with composting, in preparation for a change to Quebec’s waste management laws in 2020.
Around 40 people attended, with representatives from many municipalities present, as the speakers explained the benefits of composting and working around the challenges of doing so in rural areas.
Getting right down to business, Chloé Gourde-Bureau, a coordinator with the group, explained that it will be illegal to bury organic waste in Quebec, come 2020. This means the MRC and municipalities need to take steps now in order to avoid a sudden shock come the transition. However, these new practices are being made law for good reason.

Gourde-Bureau explained that when something is biodegradable, but doesn’t have access to oxygen, like when it is buried in a landfill, it pollutes the air with methane, rather than carbon dioxide. Methane, it turns out, is 21 per cent more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. She also said that the landfill environment could take 40 to 50 years to degrade a banana peel, whereas at a compost site, it would take only three months.
“I talk about the waste’s cost on the environment, but there’s also a real [monetary] cost,” she said, transitioning into talking about traditional recycling.
Breaking down examples from Gatineau, it costs $98.60 per tonne of garbage for waste management between transportation and disposal, while it only costs $18.84 per tonne of recycling for the city. Gourde-Bureau also broke down some easy steps for households to take advantage of in order to become more environmentally-friendly, especially when it came to recycling. While showing off a package of clementines, wrapped in the purple netting they’re sold in at grocery stores, she explained that it’s easy to repurpose this to carry other items.
The real shocker, though, came when Gourde-Bureau began discussing the zero-waste challenge. In this lifestyle, households seek to recycle and compost as much as possible, while avoiding purchasing excessive and nonrecyclable packaging. She first attempted this for a month over a year ago, employing simple habits like shopping with her own containers at stores like Bulk Barn and butchers. Deciding that it wasn’t too hard, she’s continued the lifestyle ever since and showed off her total garbage collection for the past three months – a simple pasta jar around 500 mL was all that she had been unable to recycle or compost.
Through this lifestyle, she has achieved many other successes like no longer buying chips because of the packaging and refusing junk mail.
The second half of the presentation saw the director general of Enviro Educ-Action, Geneviève Carrier, take over. Her portion focused more on household composting, as she broke down different composters available for personal or community use.
“Composting reduces 40 per cent of normal household waste,” said Carrier. “It helps a lot to rid the house of trash that costs so much to get rid of.”
She also highlighted some easy tips for composting at home, like regularly cleaning the compost bin and storing daily compost in the freezer to avoid smells and many trips to the outdoor bin.
But Carrier did say that there are more challenges to composting at home in rural areas, especially come winter.
“Normally during winter … biodegrading will slow down,” she said. “You can keep putting organic matter on there, but it will build up.”
Carrier suggested storing leaves in the fall to put on the composter come winter, as these will help the decomposition process. As well, the composter needs to have an entrance for oxygen, a decent amount of sun and an equal amount of wet and dry matter.
Enviro Educ-Action is a non-profit organization based in Gatineau, that offers many services that reach into the Outaouais. Much of their work comes in the form of counselling and planning with businesses.