Larisa Hutchinson, the Capital Regional District’s general manager of environmental services, laid out some of the very real challenges and limitations the Capital Regional District is up against in managing the region’s waste. While we’re debating waste reduction in our daily paper, our landfill continues to fill up. Despite a 2015 regional ban on food scraps going to landfill, we’re still not adequately sorting compostable food waste from garbage. More than 25,000 tonnes of food waste from around the region still ends up there each year. And in Victoria alone, pre-pandemic, city workers collected 25,000 single-use items like coffee cups and take out containers from public trash cans, every day. And, each year, city workers dump 5.4 million single-use items from our home garbage bins. I shudder to think about how this number has increased during COVID-19.