Metro went and visited the two hydroelectric installations closest to town – Beauharnois and Rivière‑des‑Prairies. The back river dam only generates 54MW. On the other hand, Beauharnois is the longest dam in North America, doing 1912MW. But both are dwarfed by the massive dams in the north and at Churchill Falls.
Nicolas Monet mentions in passing that the Montreal area has three hydro dams, but doesn’t say what the third one is. Going by this list it must be Les Cèdres (113MW).
An agreement between Quebec and Ottawa has freed up money to renovate the province’s social housing, but city housing czar Benoit Dorais warns it’s a huge job that will take a long time after years of neglect.
A study done of the city’s huge snow dumps says they’re often badly managed and at risk of collapse – or avalanche, as described here.
A snow dump in Longueuil just beside the Pont Jacques Cartier just melted its final chuck of snow last week.
Westmount used to have one in a shady quarry above chemin Cote-des-Neiges that would hang around into August some years, but it’s now been closed for a couple of decades. We called it the Mont Royal glacier.
On a tangentially related note, does anyone here know of any way to get legal access to the Francon Quarry site, short of getting a job at the snow dump?
Only one-third of Montreal residents use the city composting service, and the city is keen to increase this to reduce the amount of trash we send to landfill. But some say the actual process is too gross, especially in summertime.
I suspect the vast majority of that non-participating two-thirds is more out of ignorance/laziness/passivity/no real motivation to change than actual grossness. What is absolutely bonkers to me is how there is no limit to how much garbage you can throw away. Just make a limit for weekly garbage and then everything else you have to pay for. That would crank up composting use really quickly.
I know some places do it by weight. When you’re in a suburb and it’s very clear who’s living in each large detached house, that’s not so hard. But in the city, who’s individually responsible for which parts of the pile of garbage each week is never going to be so clear.
You just give each address a certain sized bin or bag based on their household size. Anything over that must be in city-approved and marked bags that you have to buy. It won’t be perfect but would still reduce trash volume enormously and put pressure back where it belongs on manufacturers and retailers, forcing them to reduced packaging.
There can also be unintended consequences, as some people will do things to avoid such a fee. Putting their garbage within the ‘free’ compost/recycling, dumping their garbage into sidewalk garbage bins, or worse, just littering.
In most European cities, there are receptacles on every block where people take their garbage, compost and recycling. This would be a way to charge for garbage (in Venice you need a key fob to open the garbage bin) while also encouraging people to actually sort their recycling.
A lot of people here would probably lose their minds over the change, but I think they’d eventually realize it’s a much more convenient system, because you can take your trash out whenever you want instead of having to stockpile it for collection day.
(Another challenge would be the presence of the receptacles themselves. In most cities they’re just dumpster-type bins, although many are putting them underground with a small opening on the street, like in Amsterdam. In either case, it would concentrate filth instead of having the entire street filled with garbage bags that get ripped open by squirrels and raccoons.)
Considering how many places are running out of space for garbage, it makes sense to invest in better composting infrastructures.
Where does city compost go once it’s “done”? Do they give it to farms, public gardens, etc? Imagine if there was a circular system put in place for this to happen!
Having had to purge my fridge twice in 3 months thanks to power failures, I would be happy with more frequent composting, or the block system as DeWolf describes.
I’m one of the “sorry, it turns gross” people. I don’t know why compost turns gross in a way regular garbage does not if it contains the same composted materials, but I had maggots every week in the summer, and never had them before or after (yes I cleaned the compost bin after pickup). I’d be perfectly happy to compost (garbage, everything) at a receptacle a block away.
I don’t produce a lot of garbage and can’t imagine running out of room but I can think of a lot of ways to get past the “you must use your identified bin” problem, assuming that the city will in fact pick up excess trash and not just leave it on the road to rot.
I’m trying to imagine how a shared compost bin on every block would not rapidly turn into a festering stinkpot full of rats and other vermin, especially during warm weather.
It’s one thing to imagine such a setup in a genteel boho neighbourhood where everyone is of one mind over such matters, and a well-funded municipal composting system picks up the compost and cleans the bins every day or two. But in the real world of Montreal, how would that ever work? Especially in very mixed or poor neighbourhoods (because really, composting is a middle-class luxury beyond the concerns of people who are struggling just to eat or keep up with their rent).
The last time I lived in a large building we couldn’t even keep the recycling bins — INSIDE THE BUILDING — free of stinking bags of garbage.
How would a neighbourhood compost bin on every block not turn into a stinking health hazard?
So garbage mixed with organic matter is fine, but just organic matter is somehow more gross?
Holy shit, people, we are in a climate disaster and you are all trying to find reason why we should keep on accelerating towards that disaster.
jeather, do you have any land? If so, you could install your own compost bin. If not, you could try vermicomposting. Another option is to put some compost in the freezer until collection day. I’ve done all these. Each has pros/cons, like everything, but each would allow you to divert some out of landfill.
>Holy shit, people, we are in a climate disaster and you are all trying to find reason why we should keep on accelerating towards that disaster.
You may be misreading people’s points here. I read them more as simply pointing out problems to overcome.
We keep a plastic box with all of the compost in, in the fridge until compost day when we tip it into a compost bag and put It in the brown bin. It keeps well and doesn’t smell at all.
jeather, the likely explanation for why the old style garbage didn’t breed maggots is that the paper products drew water away from the organic materials and the structure of all the materials jumbled together allowed sufficient air flow for enough water to evaporate, leaving the organic material too dry to support maggots.
My family cooks a lot and we produce at least 4 small bags of compost a week. Raccoons figured out how to open the brown bin from the city last year, so now we store the bags in a locked garbage can during the week. I then transfer the oozing bags of compost to the city brown bin early in the morning on compost day. It is definitely stinky and gross in the summer and I am relieved each week when the city workers take it away.
But food-stained paper products go in compost anyhow. I’m thinking it might be the kitty litter sweepings? Anyways, as odd as it sounds, regular garbage has never given me maggots, but composting did every week, and though I can live with fruit flies maggots gross me out.
I don’t have land, I don’t have that much freezer room. I’m not unwilling to do composting — it’s certainly no more work to throw my food garbage into a brown bin than a white one — but I’m not willing to have maggots.
Further to nau, we always end up with brown paper bags from boulangeries, takeout, etc. and instead of recycling them (since some of it is soiled anyway), we add some to our compost to absorb, add air pockets, etc.
I do the same, using up the paper bags I get from Lufa. Basically a sort of lasagna of organic scraps between layers of brown paper. Not appetizing but not actively disgusting even in high summer.
I have a bucket on the counter next to the sink that I line with a paper towel and then put a compostable bag into. When it’s full I put it in the brown bin which sits outside. In the summer it smells bad in there but I just flip open the lid, chuck the bag in, and close it again, and then on pick-up day I drag it to the curb. After they’ve emptied it and body-slammed it into the concrete sidewalk or drop-kicked it onto the grass (I assume this is how it’s done) there is typically some juice left in the bottom which I pour gently into the gutter, then close it up and put it back on the porch. If there are maggots anywhere in this process I am blissfully unaware. Are people putting their food waste directly into the brown bin and storing it indoors?
We’re not allowed to keep garbage bins on our balconies, so, yes, indoors. I tried compostable bags, paper bags, no bags; I cleaned the bin. I’m not that big of an idiot.
If I couldn’t store it outside of my living space I’m not sure I would compost. I tried vermicomposting indoors many years ago but it turned into a soggy mess and the worms could only eat like 5% of the organic waste I was producing so it didn’t seem worth it.
Jeather, these are the kinds of structural problems that are so maddening. It should be the responsibility of your building management to make composting feasible for the tenants. Instead they make stupid rules. The east coast is so wild where landlords have no legal responsibility, don’t seem to even have to keep their buildings clean.
Maybe you can argue that compost is not garbage? A trick for the maggots is that they hate the light, so I just leave the lid open and they disappear (where, I don’t know and I don’t want to know).
I can manage it because my triplex flat has a front porch and we don’t have any particular rules about what we can put outside, so the brown bin lives there. I would absolutely not keep composting materials inside at room temperature for a week.
MarcG, you’re so right. I’m on my third brown bin, the first two having been destroyed during pickup. I’m one of the two households in my six‑unit building that uses a bin, so I’ve been working my way through the ones left here a couple of years ago.
We always freeze the compost bag inside a (top cut off) 4 litre vinegar (or windshield-washer) jug. I can fit three of these in my freezer, then the bags go into the brown bin on compost pickup day. Brown bin stays clean and pristine: we’ve ever had a revolting mess to clean up yet. Although on that note, the brown bins should have smooth interiors to make cleaning it a simple easy job, but of course no they are full of little nooks and crannies bc “designers” not actually good at design.
A friend with a lush rooftop garden recently told me about a Japanese/Korean fermentation-based composting technique called bokashi that he’s using.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokashi_(horticulture)
His setup involves two plastic buckets (5 gallon IIRC), one sitting inside the other. The inside bucket has holes drilled in the bottom; the bottom container has a spigot. Compostable material, which can include meat and broken apart bones, is placed in the inside bucket and inoculated with a starter, which he buys on Amazon, and a little bran. The bucket is sealed and stored in a closet indoors, as it’s reportedly bug-free and odourless except when the lid is removed to add more compostable waste – and then the smell is mild and slightly vinegary (‘kind of like kimchi,” he reports).
After a few weeks, he drains the bottom bucket through the spigot, dilutes it with water and douses his container plants. He says it’s like feeding them growth hormone. The composted solids can also be added to soil. The only downside is a minor one: though the juice isn’t smelly, it does attract flies for the first day or two after being applied to the plants.
The reason the process is odourless is because it’s anaerobic, gives off no gases. The container is tightly sealed, with no venting.
At one of the places I lived, we had to make sure the brown bin was brought back to our backyard soon after it was emptied by the city, or else random people walking by would throw bags of dog poop in there.
EG: That happens to me. Classic Montreal to treat any receptacle as a trash bin.
David 07:40 on 2023-07-17 Permalink
Perhaps he was referring to the Des Cultures Wind Farm in Saint-Rémi and Saint-Michel.
Kate 10:38 on 2023-07-17 Permalink
He wrote “le Grand Montréal compte trois centrales hydroélectriques” which wouldn’t include wind farms, I think.
Orr 10:50 on 2023-07-17 Permalink
There are free public tours of many Hydro-Québec installations across Quebec.
We’ve done the tour of the Hydro-Quebec Beauharnois dam and one of the Manic dams (Manic-2 not the big one Manic-5)
We also visited the Electrium in Varennes, Hydro-Quebec’s electricity museum. It had an impressive maquette of all the different ways electricity can kill you around the home.
I just learned there is a “Bureau d’accueil” to visit at the HQ head office downtown too.
https://www.hydroquebec.com/visites-installations/visites-grand-public/