Piles of oranges at North Vancouver dump draw food waste concerns

A massive mound of mandarin oranges at the North Shore Recycling and Waste Centre caught the attention of Sonia Rivest.

"I have never, never seen anything like this,” she said.

Rivest, who works as a gardener, frequents the dump each week and noticed the piles more than once.

Eventually she questioned staff why the discarded fruit kept turning up at the facility.

“One of the questions I had for the people at the scales was, ‘How are you able to accept this?’” Rivest said. “Shouldn’t (they) be saying, ‘No, you can’t throw away edible food?’ They said, ‘No, there’s no regulations.’"

Fresh Direct Market, the distributor of the fruit, said the mandarin oranges that went to the compost facility were not up to standards.

“As with all fresh fruit and vegetables that arrive at our facilities, these oranges were carefully inspected by our trained staff and were determined to not meet the standards required for distribution,” a spokesperson for the company told CTV News in an emailed statement.

“We also take the issue of food waste extremely seriously, and have deep and long-standing relationships with food banks and other non-profit organizations in the region where we regularly send produce whenever we safely can. In this instance, the quantity and condition of the oranges did not make this possible.”

But that answer didn’t satisfy Rivest, who pointed to rising inflation at grocery stores.

“It’s like salt in the wound, it’s so brutal,” she said. “The schools aren’t super rich right now, hospitals aren’t super rich, care centres aren’t super rich, East Van is not super rich in certain areas – is it (that) hard to dole out the fruit?”

She also noted the carbon footprint of the oranges, which were shipped from China, then taken by truck to the waste facility.

“This is a huge problem, a huge problem.”

According to Metro Vancouver, which oversees the North Vancouver waste centre, the are no rules preventing the facility from accepting edible foods.

"We all want people to have access to nutritious, healthy food," Sheila Malcolmson, Minister of Social Development and Poverty Reduction, said in a statement to CTV News. "That’s why we funded $14 million to community groups intercepting and redistributing fresh food, helping them build the warehouses and refrigeration they need to get healthy meals to people in need."

LOCAL PROGRAMS WORKING TO REDUCE WASTE

Refeed Canada is an organization in Langley that is working to prevent food waste.

Founder Stuart Lilley said stores will give his company foods that they’re unable to sell.

“Last year we did about 5,000 tonnes of produce through our facility that found 100 per cent utility – that means we were able to rescue 100 per cent of it to feed people and to feed livestock,” said Lilley.

His company works with stores such as T&T Market and organizations such as the Greater Vancouver Food Bank.

“It could be because the entire load was rejected for temperature variations,” Lilley said of the reasons some fruits are discarded. “It could be degradation, which means some of the fruit in there is moldy or too juicy – or a lot of it is just aesthetic.”

Meanwhile, Refeed is on the verge of shutting down due to a lack of funding.

“Without the right type of systems in place, then you see what happens, what happened in North Van,” he said. “We just can’t waste this food anymore, it’s ridiculous.”