The final day of WASTECON 2020 centered on waste collection efforts in major municipalities throughout North America. 

During "Big Cities Talking Trash," moderator Clay Layne, waste application specialist at Caterpillar, spoke with following panelists:

The session examined the challenges that keep each speaker up at night as well as the opportunities that have been presented with the start of a new year. Here is a snapshot about what the panelists had to say:

On COVID...

Fernandez: It's been a long battle. I just wanted to touch on that and making the adjustment, making the transition and also trying to just keep everybody motivated and the morale up because everybody's working. Most of the society was working from home, and we're still picking up the garbage. I mean, the garbage has to get picked up, and that's something that just can't stop, just magically disappear, you got to physically go get it. With that being said, I've made it a priority for myself - making sure everybody's safe, making sure they got the supplies in hand, making sure that I'm out there. I've been out there in the operations, going to the sites, going to see people personally just saying, "Hey, I'm out here, too." We're all in this together. And they need that, and in this time. It's gone a long way, let me tell you, and we've been working really hard, and it's been really appreciated.

Grayson: I had over 20% of workforce out, which, as you can tell, it just wreaks havoc on providing on-time service, which is so core to what we all look to do for the people that we service and our respective municipalities. And today, we've had over 1400 confirmed positives of the staff. So a little over 15% of the workforce has already tested positive at least once. We've had eight fatalities that we know of that are directly COVID related. Right now, we're waiting for inclusion in the vaccine protocols that govern the state of New York. Currently, only my law enforcement division has been included. A very limited number of my 10,000 have the ability to get the vaccine in our state right this second, and we're waiting for the rest of our frontline critical workers to be available. Those are the main things that keep me up at night. We have severe budget constraints because of the pandemic. We've had the cutbacks, several of our critical programs or cleaning services. We also sweep every street and we have 23,000 little baskets hosted in the city. We've had to reduce some of those services to really get down to providing the residential service and using our resources as compactly as we can, which is a tough thing to do.

Keliher: If we're going to get out of this well, sooner rather than later, it's making sure that we're prepared to kind of come out the other end of that pipe better and stronger. And what we're trying to do in the city is be supportive of our staff always really drive that down and show that the work that everybody does is critical to the success of the city. The city can't run without efficient waste collection. Its making sure that we have all the all the safety features on our vehicles, whether it's the telematics 360 cameras, which we're installing side guards on our fleet now, to ensuring that the road users are safe as well.

Other challenges...

Fernandez: We've seen a lot of the seasoned older folks kind of retiring, and leave. So, you're losing that institutional knowledge that we've had in the business. We do our own collection. We manage about 900,000 tons that we collect ourselves. So, it's a pretty big operation, and you start losing these folks that do this day in, day out, and they've done it for 20-30 years. Luckily, we do our training internally. We promote and we do a lot promoting from within. So, you could have been a labor worker on the back of a truck or at a landfill and we help you get your CDL and get you into the truck and train you. But that institutional knowledge takes time. It takes time to get  the habit of driving that truck, the routes and being safe. As well as on top of that. Aging facilities. We have aging facilities throughout the county transfer stations that are 40-50 years old. Landfill capacity is - we're kind of reaching towards the end. And on the disposal side, we manage about 1.8 million tons a year. So, it's in that space that can run out very fast. Luckily, we have a waste strategy facility that processes over a million tons a year alone, but we're gonna have to look at that to that facility that was built back in the 80s. We're gonna have to really look at either refurbishing that facility or or building a new one.

Grayson: We have old infrastructure. We are hosting over 100 facilities, some of them are decades old. One of the downsides of being a 140-year-old business is that we have we constantly have a capital upgrade procedure that has dozens of projects in the pipeline every single year. And then when you hit a one-, two-year budget cycle, that's a monkey wrench in that you start to not have to play Maslow's needs and everything's important. I mean, this is the weird thing. It's the running on the tone of our entire business of what we do for the public. We've been telling our workforce, and we've been even reminding the public as much as we can, that, even throughout a pandemic that is health based, we may have an chance of getting sick by coming to work and doing our job or being exposed to one another. On the same token, if we don't come in, everybody gets sick. We must move this material out. The foundation of any good municipality is how good they remove their waste, how good they manage the waste stream and it's all an underlying quality of life. And it's very interesting getting in those rooms. But I think that, that now you have to go down to and in some cases, sit in a room and come up with blank canvases to remap out. I think now there are definitely times to make improvements.

Keliher: The other big pieces that are that are moving along here in Toronto is the extended producer responsibility. Right now, the city and all areas in Ontario receive up to 50% cost recovery through producers and the provincial government is moving that over to 100% by 2023. And looking at having producers generally take over the collection and recycling. So, that's going to have an impact on our routing, on our staff on our vehicles, equipment, you name it. It's a massive shift for the residents. They're not going to see much of a change. The material will be picked up on their collection day, and that's it. It's the back office work and the coordination and aligning all of our assets to make sure we get the most value out of them long term that is absolutely critical, but also ensuring staff know that we have their back and we want to make sure that we continue to grow the team and that this isn't a way to you know, reduce our staff and make sure that you know that we're a family and we take care of everybody as best as we can. So those are really the major items for us right now. 

Opportunities for improvements and efficiencies....

Fernandez: We're looking hard at technology. Starting in the solid waste business over 20 years ago, we used to do routes on on match with pins,  and I think some most of us have that fundamental routing experience but technology nowadays is great. I hope to see soon in the future that we have tablets and these trucks that can help improve service levels. I mean, imagine the driver and staff calling dispatch and calling in a car that's broken or a dumpster or anything. They could press a button and put a work order in straight to the car or car crews and they get it done. The customer doesn't have to do anything. That's something we're looking at. There's so much technology out there, so much stuff out there that we could do nowadays. I mean, these trucks are like running computers going around town. We're gonna have to look at our facilities and our landfill expansion. So, we're exploring vertical expansions and horizontal expansions. We need to think outside the boxes. You just can't build a new landfill in somebody's backyard. I mean, we're out of space. So, that's something we're going to be looking at and our waste to energy facility. I think now with the whole electric vehicle concept is a great way to explore how you could connect waste to energy with electric vehicles.

Keliher: What we're doing here is ontinuing to expand our organics management program. Two of our anaerobic digestion facilities are beyond capacity. So, we have merchant capacity that we have to go use and in last year's budget, and then again, in this year's budget, we're moving forward with the third anaerobic digestion facility to maintain the growth trajectory of the population and that material. But one of the pieces that we have on those facilities is a renewable natural gas generation. What we're able to do at our facility, one of them that actually just came online a couple months ago, was generate natural gas, put it back into the grid, and the city in general is using that natural gas to fuel buildings and fleet. So, right now it's around a 7% blend. In the city, all city assets that use natural gas 7% of that is now renewable. In 2022, our second facility, the renewable natural gas component will come online there and will be up to around a 15% usage of blending. All equipment and buildings that use natural gas will have 15% renewable blend, and our third facility once that's up again, that'll only increase it but we're also doing work at our landfills to capture that gas. And seeing the pros and cons of the movement right now on whether it's hydrogen, or renewable, natural gas, and really putting business cases together to see which one will provide the most long-term value. We're also going to be working with our First Nations communities in and around the landfills as well to to get their support and work at this collaboratively. 

Editor's Note: This information have been edited for length and clarity.