Solid Waste Management Labour Market Study
Notes from the Second National Steering Committee Meeting
8.00am -4.00pm, November 26th 2009
Erin Mills Room, Hilton Toronto Airport
Attendees
Hubert Bourque (Plasco Energy Group/ECO Canada Chairman), Michael Cant (Golder Associates), Guy Crittenden (Solid Waste and Recycling Magazine), Kevin Vibert (Standing in for Vivian De Giovanni (Municipal Waste Association)), John Lackie (SWANA Ontario Chapter), Roy Neehall (City of Edmonton, Waste Management), Kevin Matthews (CCI BioEnergy), Maxine Welch (Seneca College)
Attendee via Teleconference
Konrad Fichtner (AECOM)
Ex-Officio
Angela Arsenault (HRSDC)
ECO Canada Staff
Grant Trump, Marsha Mahabir, Brayden Unwin
Regrets
Cal Bricker (Waste Management Canada), Rob Cook (Ontario Waste Management Association), Jean Beaudoin (RCI Environnement Inc) Paula Kuryk (Recycling Council or Alberta), Mike Watt (Walker Environmental Group),
Retired Members
Mario Seguin (Plasco Energy Group), Pierre Lemoine (Groupe Tiru Canada), Gilles Pineault (Dessau-Soprin)
Note Taking
The raw meeting notes were transcribed off a recording of the meeting taken using a Sony IC Recorder ICD–B 600
1. Opening (9.00am)
The meeting opened with remarks of welcome by Grant Trump, President and CEO, ECO Canada to attendees at the second NSC meeting for this particular project on solid waste management. Grant acknowledged that the NSC reviewed a variety of documents submitted by ECO Canada in their preparation for the meeting. Additionally distributed at the start of the meeting day were the UK reports on waste management and recycling. Grant mentioned that at the close of the first committee meeting on March 2009, the NSC was in agreement that it was time to commence a study such as this one, and summarized that the agenda for the second meeting is to look at what has happened, the data collected, what’s going on and look towards the future where we are going. This was followed by an introduction of steering committee members in attendance, noting that several members were unable to participate but would be updated on the proceedings.
2. Power Point Presentations In The Order Presented On the Meeting Day
· ECO Canada Update – Presentation by Grant Trump, President and CEO, ECO Canada
· Review of The Key Findings of Employer Survey and Employee Focus Groups – Presentation by Anne-Marie Vincent and Jean-Paul Thiéblot, Zins Beauchesne and Associates via Teleconference
· Review and Status of The Solid Waste Management Labour Market Study – Marsha Mahabir, Manager, Labour Market Information, ECO Canada
3. Open Discussion
(i) NSC Remarks Arising From The Contractors Presentation
1. Overall the NSC agreed that the focus of the report needs to be on where the industry is going, looking beyond the status quo to understand the issues that will develop in the SWM labour market. All members emphasized that there is need for more pronounced input from employers with respect to the future of the industry.
2. An NSC member commented that he was not sure we would have been able to get the information had there been employer focus group conducted, the reason being that when you speak to the corporations of the challenges they are likely to face in the future they perhaps are not ready to make that move until it becomes abundantly clear that form a financial point of view also the relationships with their shareholders that this is a strategy that they can implement. However, when you speak to individual managers faced with the task for making money and their own specific markets understand that if they do not get with the new technology their customers are not going to be as sup portative as they were in the past so this is a problem.
Secondly, the NSC member read with interest the UK report on human resources in SWM and thinks there is some material there on how things might evolve in the North American market. In spite of the fact that there is anticipation obtaining a certain direction from the survey and we now find that it may not be there, these are things important to keep in mind and note that the report and our organization provides support and leadership for the country and there is an expectation that the industry is going through significant change has not come out from the information you get in surveys. Although 850 responses were completed the contractor is reporting in status quo and thinks that reporting in status quo allows us to accurately assess what the human resource requirements are for the industry.
3. The NSC recognises fully that the survey was done to get a the snapshot and no one debates that the data presented provides a good ‘snapshot’ of the current labour market of the SWM industry today but, not one that reflects changes in technology that will occur within the industry, i.e. where will the supply of labour needed to run this new technology come from? The issue is that the people who filled out the survey were not the right people to talk about the future of the industry so this is something we need to take a further look at or can we extract this information from some of the interviews with employers that were done.
4. Status quo is not where the jobs will come from.
5.
6. Waste is beginning to be viewed as a resource (waste to energy). Another school of thought is an increase in producers being responsible for the end use or life span of the products they produce. A view from 10,000 feet would be that in ten years the numbers found in the survey are going to be different in the future.
7. There are two forms to the waste industry
(i) Collection of garbage – someone will still need to pick up the garbage, not likely to change much.
(ii) Drop off, landfills – what happens to the waste after it is dropped off is going to change drastically.
8. There is a need to understand where the need is across the sector due to its diversity. It is not likely that every area would experience the same issues.
9. Agreed that small waste companies pose a challenge as a representation of the SWM sector
(i) There are more people employed by larger organizations and the differences between the two are quite significant.
(ii) Zins Beauchesne and Associates to partition those two groups out to understand the differences between the two.
(iii) Need to consider the rate of change among smaller companies as they are often the slowest to change. The industry is predominantly pushed forward by municipalities and the consulting firms. Reasoning as follows:
a) Largely because waste management companies are not driven by elected officials whereas public representatives in charge of municipal waste are.
b) Similarly consulting companies are interested in remaining ahead of their competition.
10. The technological advancements are often pioneered by smaller companies; they often are the ones looking for resolution.
11. When talking about garbage collection there are vested interests in having that flow continue, need to understand that we are not looking at environmental companies, we’re dealing with garbage which is more of dirty job in people’s minds.
12. Right now we are not seeing a responsibility from industries that create waste, this will have a drastic change on those smaller companies as waste collection becomes something that is highly regulated and the companies responsible for waste production are paying for it directly, not just to remove it.
13. Rename the study to Secondary Resource Management. The industry is no longer management of solid waste.
(ii) NSC Remarks Arising From Marsha's Presentation (1.30pm)
1. Attendees agreed that the data collected by the contractor will give a good snapshot of the solid waste business today. Its weakness lies in the prediction as to what will happen in the industry. It was recognised that it was difficult to capture this information in the survey as the nature of survey likely could not have done both. The NSC agreed to use the thoughts of the day’s meeting as a means to supplement information about the forecasted industry in the final report (see section (iii)). In addition, it was suggested that ECO Canada incorporate, into the Recommendations/Next Steps/Future Needs Section of the final report, subject matter on the following three (3) areas :
(i) A forecast of the SWM Labour Market from the NSC’s perspective as mentioned earlier consisting of 3-4 pages that considers observations and suggestions made by the NSC at the second meeting
(ii) The global Solid Waste Management Industry and Labour Market
(iii) The NSC findings in new SWM technology
These topics will not only satisfy the professional requirements with the contractor but also provide insight into the “difficult to collect” information on future needs for new technology in the SWM industry that stakeholders want to see and that will not be captured by the current ‘snapshot’ of data collected from the employer survey.
2. The priority is to understand and try to predict where the labour supply for new SWM employees will come from, what areas of SWM employment will be required and when.
3. There will be a shift in workers from disposal to diversion. Currently, 78% of Canada’s waste stream is disposed and 22% is diverted. In the future, disposal will become smaller and diversion will become bigger. If the NSC contexts SWM employment in terms of Canada’s waste stream, then a different skill set will be required. The need becomes determining the skills that will be required to serve the SWM industry as diversion grows.
4. The NSC expressed that politics plays so significant a role in solid waste management being 95%politics and 5%technical. For example, today Quebec may input funding into organic waste management but in 2 years it may be different or today the Government may agree with the move toward end product responsibility but a change in Government could stop the process. In spite of this, the NSC knows that Canada will need a different skill set. They articulated that they have seen facilities reach 95% of the way to completion, and then collapse because they needed 15-20 people with a new skill set, thought it would be put in place but it did not materialise.
5. There are a large number of other (non SWM) employees in the SWM business. The question arose - how well are their competencies defined? Are there some human resource strategies that would benefit them and in turn benefit their employers?
6. There are two distinct components to the SWM industry based on the way it behaves:-
(i) One where National Occupation Standards (NOS) make an organisation more efficient and help to define the type of individual that should be produced to meet the needs of the standard,
(ii) Another part is how to define the NOS for individuals in emerging areas when it is difficult define the position of individuals in new areas.
The industry is faced with a dual challenge, one with becoming efficient and the other of adding a resource base to move it forward, however, NOS will result in the sector being more efficient.
7. Based on the above thoughts the NSC decided to create a laundry list of technologies, activities and broad changes that will impact the future SWM labour market with no particular emphasis that one route will be a winner over the other.
(iii) SWM Labour Market Forecast – the NSC’s perspective
To project SWM labour needs, the NSC listed technologies that will be moving into the traditional solid waste business, their thoughts on where these technologies will lead and broad changes that will be required in the next 5 years, as follows:-
NSC Comment: the terminology we use is important. In categorising the list with labels it is important to recognise how the public views it, e.g. they relate to biofuels.
New Technologies
· Anaerobic digestion (AD)
· Gasification
· Replace parts of incineration
· Replace parts of composting
· Incineration referring to newer incineration technology like fluidized beds and plasma not rotating grids. 140,000 metric tonnes mass-burn incinerator facilities will still exist. It is better to use the term waste to energy or residuals to energy.
Fuel Production
The new way of doing things has resulted in all these technologies whether old or new being energy producing technologies. All of them produce renewable energy, e.g. there cannot be a landfill without biogas or an incinerator without energy recovery.
Anaerobic digestion (AD) and Plasma Gasification and all its variants will see more attention. It will begin with AD because gasification from the environmentalist point of view is a fancy term for incineration. Of the two technologies, AD will probably be implemented easiest as it is a replacement for composting and in some markets composting has received bad rapport.
Incineration cannot be excluded as in some markets their will be an acceptability for incineration as a solution to waste disposal, e.g. the Burnaby plant, incinerator in Québec city has received good social acceptance, so it is not inconceivable that incineration technology will be developed in other markets.
Improvements in landfill stewardship
Those who are taking landfill gas technology to a higher level cannot be discounted as they have developed good relationships with communities enabling acceleration of waste decomposition processes to produce more energy. These leaders in landfill gas technology have introduced rigor in the way a landfill is run and cannot sit in the same category as AD, gasification and incineration technologies as these are forms of conversion of waste materials as a resource into local energy. With our current focus, while there are new technologies we also have a renewal or redefinition of the way we do things now. If a landfill has to be run technically, strong relations with the community, significant community engagement and public education are needed for the community to see that the operation is not what they in their minds think land disposal of waste is about. This is the only way to change public perception of the way people commonly think of landfills.
At the SWANA landfill symposium there was a presentation of a software program of an operator driving a compactor which tells him exactly where he has been with a GPS and where to steer his compactor to obtain maximum compression for depletion of airspace in the landfill. This is a huge savings. What one would think of as dirty truck driver job is becoming a high tech job as the operator controls the machine and now has the information to optimize his equipment. This is also true of collection trucks. Technical training for waste collector operator has been provided so that understand how to read the GPS, how to use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags on the waste bins and carts, mobile readers, antennas and sensors in garbage collection trucks, and how to optimize their collection efficiencies and set up air miles rewards programs for people setting up their recyclables.