My client is a multi-tenant. The building total waste is strictly controlled and all tenants participate in the waste selective collection and the condominium is the responsible for all of the waste separation and disposal.
The problem occurs with the only residue measured by volume, and not by weight, which is the organic waste, and it basically consists of toilet waste.
Tenants say that every volume considered "organic" comes from toilets, however the the volume is too high and when using the volume to weight conversion, all of our efforts to divert waste from landfills end up being in vain.
We were able to recycle 100% of glass, paper, cardboard, plastic and aluminum waste, however, once we include the amount of organic waste, we reach less than 50% of the value.
Can I remove the organic waste of MRc7 credit and only introduce it to MRC6 audit?
Is there an alternative that I can use to comply with this credit?
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Trista Brown
Project DirectorWSP USA
456 thumbs up
July 9, 2013 - 10:15 pm
Hi Ryan, by toilet waste do you mean tissues and other bathroom waste? That material should be relatively light, in terms of weight. If you can give some more background on what kind of materials you're talking about maybe we can troubleshoot this a bit. But in general, you wouldn't be allowed to omit this kind of ongoing waste stream.
Gabriel Frasson
Project ManagerOTEC
3 thumbs up
September 6, 2013 - 3:14 pm
Hi Trista,
This building has just been certified, but this credit was denied.
We were able to derivated nearly 100% of all normally recyclable waste, such as glass, paper, cardboard, light bulbs, plastic and so on. However, the wet waste (bathroom waste and organic waste) were stored and measured differently. The waste company only noted the wet waste garbage containers numbers, and not its weight.
The alternative that we had was to add the containers numbers and multiply by each volume (using the kg conversion factor suggested by LEED), but as the within container waste was not compacted and also sometimes the container was not complete, the total quality in kg obtained by conversion was extremely high.
We tried to argue in the review, but we did not achieved the point.
This was a lesson learned about waste management. Then this we need to be more carefully about wet waste diversion.
My goal here is just disseminate lessons learned.
Thank you.
Barry Giles
Founder & CEO, LEED Fellow, BREEAM FellowBuildingWise LLC
LEEDuser Expert
338 thumbs up
September 6, 2013 - 8:19 pm
Gabriel...I'm totally confused as to why GBCI would deny the credit. would it be too much trouble to post the GBCI review comments. Seems that from your posts the alternative of taking volume for the gross total, rather than weight may have been an option. Did not GBCI offer that as a solution?