Waste Not, Want Not, Keroles Riad on managing Montreal’s waste

A talk with Keroles Riad about how Waste Not, Want Not are helping Montreal manage waste.

“Waste Not, Want Not” is currently a student group at Concordia based in Montreal Canada. The group was formed due to a collaboration between students professors and the administration.

The objective of the group is to couple top-down infrastructure improvement with grass-roots infrastructure. I spoke with Kerolas Riad, about the project and what they wish to achieve in the future.

Keroles is a P.H.D student and a public scholar. He spoke about how the point of “Waste not want not” is to educate citizens about sensible waste management. “If we help people to take the first step of learning how to sort their waste, they will take the bigger step of reducing waste on their on,” he said.

Keroles continued by speaking about the level of experience within the team itself. “Our belief has been enforced by our 4- year experience doing this work at Concordia, academic literature, and our market research literature with over 20 organisations in Montreal. We now want to focus on making a spin off-model in other organisations and scale our impact”.

On the background of himself and his team, Kerolas spoke about how Waste not, Want not, came together out of a passion for environmental protection rather than a career opportunity.

“My academic and research passions preceded my new passion for fighting the climate and waste crisis. The entire Waste Not Want Not team comes from outside the usual “sustainable bubble”. We were never the people who just knew the answers to everything and went about disseminating our wisdom to the masses. We are learning alongside our community”.

Keroles digressed upon the companies successes and how they are getting their message across to the community. “Since Waste Not, Want Not started in 2016, the Concordia community doubled its annual composting rates, halved contamination in compost bins, and each concordian reduced the number of waste by overall two months”.

He admitted that achievements such as this were a huge boost for morale, as it demonstrates the message of reduce, reuse, and recycle being absorbed. “ What I appreciate the most is how many people must have adjusted their behaviour in order to achieve it. Awareness efforts are just noise and clutter if the community does not respond”.

In terms of what could’ve been done differently, Keroles spoke of how paying waste ambassadors is the best means of getting a message across in a community setting. “You can have the ambassadors go to events, where food is served and stand next to waste stations and show event participants how to sort out their waste. Logistics is always a nightmare! Last year we decided to pay a small community of ambassadors a living wage. Paying people for doing the work that matters allows us to more, better and for less money”.

Keroles then moved onto his own personal reasons for getting involved, and how having a health condition pushed him to commit to a positive cause. “ I grew up constantly being told what I could and couldn’t do. I wanted to prove that a small team of interns could make an institutional impact. My team and I  are determined to prove that a student initiative can scale to have a city-wide impact across the whole of Montreal”.

With this reasoning in mind, Keroles believes the group is acting in the people’s best interest. “85% of people feel guilty about the waste they generate. If we can just get people to go off autopilot, to learn how to sort, they will consciously reduce waste on their own. It gives us confidence that the waste crisis is manageable if we work together”.

Obviously COVID-19 has had a major blocking effect on all forms of organisations. Keroles detailed how Waste Not Want Not has been coping with the pandemic, discussing how they used the time to sort out a bigger and more expansive business model.

“We wanted to work on our business plan as we knew it would be time-consuming. We also launched the #CUcompost picture campaign from home.  We miss seeing everyone in the team and helping people in the community learn how to sort their waste”.

Before we finished our conversation, Keroles mentioned Waste Not Want Nots plans for the future, how they hope to increase the scale of their efforts for the good of the environment.

“We have been working with District 3, a startup incubator at Concordia, to do our market research and develop our business plan,” he said. “We intend to do whatever we can to fix the waste crisis, so our service will expand over time. We are starting with Montreal, with the aspirations to scale provisionally, nationally, and internationally”.

If you would like to learn more about  Keroles and Waste Not, Want Not, he can be accessed at keroles.riad@gmail.com and also by his twitter  @Kerologist and Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerolesriad/

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