Yorkdale Shopping Centre reduced their Waste by 117 Full Garbage Bags a Day
Leadership in waste management is not always easy to come by and so when we see corporations lead, we think it to be extremely important to reward that behaviour. That’s why we’d like to highlight the efforts of a certain food court that’s done a great job at maximizing recycling efforts and improving their waste management program.
The collective of business leaders at Yorkdale Shopping Centre have done an incredible job at eliminating over 117 bags of garbage a day, while targeting food court recyclables and compostable products. How Yorkdale Mall was able to do this is rather impressive. Replacing single-use plates and cutlery, Yorkdale was able to completely change around the way it does waste management in its food court. As an added bonus, it’s also brought with it more hours and more jobs. Every week now, the shopping centre’s food court washes approximately 75,000 dishes and 53,000 pieces of cutlery. Assuming this same approach were to be taken at other food courts across Toronto, there’s no telling what we might be able to accomplish!
Before the change, waste management at the Yorkdale Shopping Centre wasn’t necessarily a huge issue for them. After all, all they had to do was collect it, bag it, ship it out to pick-up, and off it would go. Though it wasn’t a problem for Yorkdale Mall, it’s easy to recognize how this amount of waste could be an issue for the community. After all, the Yorkdale food court serves 24,000 customers every day. That’s a lot of waste that needs to be accounted for. The fact that management at Yorkdale would take the initiative to reduce their waste output says a lot about their priorities and the impact they see know they have on the community around them. Their efforts have reduced the average 120 garbage bags a day they used to produce down to an impressive three.
To any stakeholder who may have doubted the plausibility of a waste reduction this size, they’ve been proven wrong. These efforts have also come at virtually no cost to the customer, who are still able to request and opt-in for a takeout container. Looking around the food court, a customer will also see no garbage cans present. This was meant to send a clear sign that customers are not tasked with separation of materials or anything. All a customer needs to do is hand over their tray with everything on it and employees at Yorkdale do the rest. Yorkdale Mall continues to be actively engaged in recycling what they can and composting what they can, all in an effort to reduce the waste that goes out. In an era when commercial businesses, institutions, and industrial operations are sending exponentially more waste to our landfills than households are, this is welcome news.
Canadians are estimated to spend more than $600 million every year eating at limited-service eating places, such as food courts. In some food courts, as little as 12 percent of total waste is recycled or composed, despite the fact that anywhere from 60-75 percent could be. Regarding shopping mall waste management initiatives, Yorkdale has proved it can be done. We salute the great work that Yorkdale Mall has done at reducing its waste output and we hope more malls will follow their lead in the months to come!
