The Moose Jaw landfill is slowly approaching the end of its life, with the current permit showing it will soon run out of room. This means the City is now in the midst of making up a new plan.

To help with this, members of the City and the Environment Advisory Group recently took a trip over to Regina to visit their municipal partners and view their landfill to possibly generate some ideas for waste management in Moose Jaw. The Regina landfill is larger, and it also has gas wells that collect methane and help create power to contribute to the energy grid through a partnership with SaskPower.

With all this in mind, a new Waste Management Masterplan is slowly being created.

"This is an exciting time in that plan because you're open to all options," said City Engineer Josh Mickleborough. "You want to be looking at everything from producing energy with or at your landfill, to trying to divert everything in some other way and what does that mean for the residential doors and folks in the city, and how does that impact how they're going to have to sort, manage, and deal with their waste."

When they reach out to the community they'll want to know what residents want to see and how they want to take on the challenges that come with managing our waste. They expect community consultations should be coming out sometime this November.

"It's our community's solid waste utility, and we need to know what your preferences are to inform a decision," Mickleborough explained. "You know, do you want five different bins for waste in front of your house, do you want central bins, do you want one bin and then, of course, there's cost associated with all of them and then again some opportunities with a lot of them too."

Mickleborough added that they are currently working on a five-year timeline and will be using the next year to put all the input from the community together. A lot of analysis and engineering will have to go into what options they select. That will involve programs, designs, policies, bylaws, agreements, and construction.

Even though they are working on a five-year timeline, that could be extended as the City could try to divert waste somewhere else.

With files from the “Friendly City Insider” podcast.