Where does your garbage go? A (foggy) look inside Thunder Bay's landfill

Good morning everyone, welcome to the Solid Waste and Recycle facility. In honor of circular economy month, the city of Thunder Bay is offering a free bus tour of the city's landfill. This is a great opportunity for people to find out where their trash goes and how it's processed once it's picked up at the curb. What made the two of you want to come on this tour today? Honestly just wanting to learn more about what's going on and just the anxieties around garbage waste and what recycling is going on. What's one of the most surprising things you've learned so far? Definitely seeing how the landfill ends up and how it turns into a methane gas field and how that eventually gets turned into power. I had no idea. I think a lot of people grew up calling this the dump, but we are not calling it the dump anymore. So we call it the landfill. The definition of a dump is basically where you would go and drop off your garbage and there's no engineer controls in place to make sure that that garbage isn't contaminating the environment. On our site here, we have certain processes in place to make sure that we are protecting the environment. We have a leachate collection system where we collect leachate and treat it. We also have a landfill gas collection system where we capture the methane and it goes to a generating plant and we put the generation, the electricity, back on the grid. We have a leaf and yard waste lay down area. So any leaf and yard waste that comes to our site, that goes to that site and we grind it. We turn that all into compost, which we later on give away for free to any citizen of Thunder Bay Did you get a little garbage can? Yeah. What are you going to put in there? Candy. Candy, that's what I was going to say. Smart move. Derek, why did you want to come on this tour today? I wanted to educate my child on the importance of recycling and the landfill and to understand that when you throw your garbage in a garbage can, it doesn't just disappear. There's something that actually happens with it. So I really enjoy the questions from the public because that way I know that they're engaged. The tour really interests me because it gives people the knowledge of what actually happens here. Like I said earlier, most people come here, drop off their garbage, and think it magically takes care of itself.