Piles of oranges at North Vancouver dump draw food waste concerns
CTV
A woman from Metro Vancouver is speaking out after spotting mounds of mandarin oranges discarded at the dump.
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 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.