Household goods find new life at ‘reuse space’ within recycling centre

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

The “three R’s” — reduce, reuse, recycle — have guided environmentalists and anti-waste activists for decades.

The écocentres operated by the Ville de Québec are mostly known for the third R – recycling. However, a new pilot project at the Écocentre des Rivières in Saint-Sauveur puts the emphasis on reuse, with the ultimate goal being to reduce the amount of material going into the city’s incinerator.

Overseen by the circular economy nonprofit Coop Car- bone, the Espace réemploi (reuse space) aims to recover construction materials and all kinds of items that are still usable, such as tools, household items, hardware, doors, lumber, gardening supplies and so on to “give them a second life” as theatre sets and building supplies. Salvageable material can be dropped off at a designated area at the Ecocentre during the facility’s regular opening hours; on Fridays, a Coop Carbone representative will be onsite to discuss how the items might be used. The items will be transported by personnel from Entraide diabétique Québec and Recyclage Vanier – a nonprofit aiming to bring people with limited formal education and other challenges back onto the job market – to La Remise culturelle, which collects and warehouses used furniture and housewares for theatre sets, and La Patente, a Lower Town co-op where people learn to build and repair household goods, which also hosts a lending library of tools.

The Espace reémploi is a one-year pilot project sup- ported by an $80,000 grant from the Ville de Québec. Coun. Pierre-Luc Lachance, vice president of the executive committee, is the city’s point person on the project. “The city encourages the development of the circular economy within its territory in order to limit the amount of waste we produce each year in Quebec City,” he said in a statement. “The Espace réemploi project has the advantage of bringing together key stakeholders in the sector working to extract the full value from the resources we use. In this sense, our commit- ment to the circular economy is not only promising from an environmental perspective, but is also a vector for creating wealth and solidarity in the community.”

The government of Canada defines a circular economy as a system where nothing is wasted, which “retains and recovers as much value as possible from resources by re- using, repairing, refurbishing, remanufacturing, repurposing or recycling products and materials.” Audrey Roberge, a circular economy advisor at Coop Carbone, said her organization was “reflecting about how to bring the circular economy to the next level, tak- ing inspiration from different [practices]. We really need a central space where anything ‘circular economy’ can live, kind of a circularity incubator where we can bring a circular project to term.” She said the project was inspired by ReTuna, a shopping mall in Eskilstuna, Sweden, located next to a recycling centre, which sells secondhand and salvaged goods and hosts repair spaces – a “one-stop shop where people can deal with their throwaways.” In Quebec City, local regulations mean people can’t “go shopping” for salvage at the écocentre, so Roberge and her colleagues looked around and found other outlets for the material.

“It’s a pilot project, so we’ll wait and see how receptive people are, but we would [eventually] like it to be in the five écocentres [across the city] year round,” Roberge said.