Sharp Edges: Managing Hazardous Waste in Ottawa
The number of improperly discarded needles in downtown Ottawa is rising, but data shows that most needles and other hazardous waste in Ottawa is collected safely.
Story by Stephanie Thompson, 23 December 2022.
Needle drop boxes are a common sight around downtown Ottawa, including this one at 530 King Edward Avenue. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
Brian Boucher, a resident of Somerset ward in Ottawa, feels that there are more needles downtown than ever. Having previously lived in the Rideau-Vanier ward for three years, Boucher left Canada during the pandemic and recently returned in June 2022. He frequents a local park with his dog and often encounters discarded drug paraphernalia.
"Dundonald Park up the road... there's constantly people up there hanging out - the Beer Store's across the street, so they're in the park consuming beers and I've seen people passed out on the park benches with crack pipes laying beside them. There's one little area by the bushes that I have found razor blades and needles laying just in the grass and under the park benches," Boucher said.
Nicholas Conroy, a Senior Property Manager at Sentinel Management Inc, has managed a condo building in Rideau-Vanier since March 2019. He shares the perception that the problem is worsening in downtown Ottawa. In an email interview, he stated that "there seemed to be a period of time during COVID where [the number of needles found] improved, but we are seeing more needles as of the summer of 2022."
Improperly discarded needles found in Rideau-Vanier in October 2021 by Horticare Landscaping (Photo: Derrick Beduhn of Horticare Landscaping)
Conroy has struggled with this issue in his work, as he noted that improperly discarded needles "...can impact health and safety for maintenance contractors and our ability to find contractors to work for the building." When taking over the property in 2019, the building's previous landscaper, Horticare Landscaping, "...had originally refused to continue maintenance due to the hazard." The landscaping company agreed to continue working on the downtown property following assurances that the issue of improperly discarded needles was a thing of the past, but their workers have begun to find needles on the property again. Conroy noted that in 2022, "...[Horticare] found needles on about three occasions at the front entrance."
Stories of the increase in improperly discarded needles downtown are backed up by data from Ottawa Public Health (OPH). Data available on the OPH website shows a steady increase each year in the number of improperly discarded needles, from just over 8,000 collected in 2013 to 36,000 collected in 2021. Despite this dramatic increase, improperly discarded needles comprise only 1.78% of all needles collected by Ottawa Public Health in 2021. The other 98.22% of needles are retrieved through avenues that are safer for the public, including needle drop boxes, household hazardous waste depots, and OPH partner agencies.
Click here to view a visualization of the number of improperly discarded needles by ward.
Data for this visualization was obtained via Ottawa Public Health's available information on improperly discarded needles retrieved by ward by City staff and Needle Hunters. Ward boundaries were added using data from Open Ottawa's Wards 2022-2026 data.
Click here to view a visualization of the total number of needles retrieved in Ottawa by year.
Data for this visualization was obtained via Ottawa Public Health's estimates on needles retrieved. OPH notes that figures are calculated by weight.
Ottawa Public Health has a wide variety of strategies in place to manage hazardous waste. The first and most visible are the needle drop boxes run by Ottawa Public Health. Needle drop boxes are located outdoors, making them accessible 24/7 for people to drop individual needles or sharps boxes.
"Ottawa Public Health also oversees the Needle Hunters program, and works with City services, to quickly respond to improperly discarded needles," OPH shared in an email statement. Needle Hunters, established in 1998, "are a group of people who proactively search for and dispose of these items in priority neighbourhoods across the City. Their clean up routes are constantly monitored and adjusted in order to target areas of particular need," as described in Ottawa Public Health literature. Needle drop boxes and the Needle Hunters route are primarily concentrated in downtown Ottawa, where the highest numbers of improperly discarded needles are found. At the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, the staff estimates that 1200 needles are collected at the needle drop box outside each day, and the drop box services clients who are not able to access the supervised consumption site inside.
““The Needle Hunters and Needle Drop Box programs began in the 1990’s and both have increased service levels over the years. Drop box locations are selected based on a number of factors including changing dynamics in community safety and convenience of access for those looking to dispose of their sharps. As such, OPH continually assesses available data to understand trends and how to best serve the community.”
Click here to view a map of Ottawa's Needle Drop Boxes & Take It Back Locations.
The map above was visualized using an Open Ottawa dataset entitled Needle Drop Boxes and Take it Back! The applicable City, Province, and Postal Code were added to the addresses in the dataset to ensure accuracy. Ward boundaries were added using data from Open Ottawa's Wards 2022-2026 data.
The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre houses the Oasis program and serves the community of Rideau-Vanier (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
Supervised consumption sites are another harm reduction strategy in many North American cities, including Ottawa. These sites offer proactive strategies to provide care for individuals who consume drugs, while also managing hazardous waste. The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre operates Oasis, a clinic offering multifaceted services for individuals at risk for contracting hepatitis and HIV. Derrick St. John, the Oasis Nursing Team Leader, is a friendly face at the supervised consumption site. Derrick introduced me to the different services offered at Oasis, which include the supervised consumption site, a drop in space for clients to grab a warm meal and socialize, and a primary care clinic.
Derrick St. John is the Oasis Nursing Team Leader, pictured here at the supervised consumption site at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
The Oasis program began over 20 years ago with a focus on HIV prevention, and the supervised consumption site opened in 2018. The Oasis supervised consumption site sees approximately 18,000 visits per year from 700 to 900 unique clients. St. John explained that despite misconceptions, the supervised consumption site offers many benefits to the surrounding Sandy Hill community.
"The number that really stick[s] out to me is the overdoses that we respond to in a year or so, like last year was 712. If you imagine 712 overdoses, that's potentially 700 people who could have experienced really bad effects from those drugs. That would have been an extra 700 ambulances dispatched. That's 700 extra scenes of chaos in in the neighborhood. So that's a number that we have a lot of pride in."
St. John explained that part of the reason why the number of improperly discarded needles has increased over the years is the changing drug supply.
"When these injection sites were conceived, it was heroin and oxycontin, so longer acting opioids [with a] half life of 6 to 8 hours. So someone using heroin could use two or three times a day. To avoid the the dope sickness with fentanyl [injecting 2 - 3 times per day] is just not possible. We see people injecting up to 12, 13, 15 times a day. Then what we're seeing in the community in terms of improperly disposed sharps and drug paraphernalia falls in line with that. I'm sure if we've plotted that folks are using 12 times a day, well then that's minimum 12 syringes," St. John explained.
He also explained that individuals consume drugs in public downtown due to concerns about overdosing.
"This is one of the reasons why we have so much open drug use in the downtown core and public drug use is because at least if folks are injecting in public if they overdose, it's seen and we can respond."
Upon arrival at the supervised consumption site at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, clients are provided with a variety of harm reduction supplies. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
One of the five booths provided to clients at the supervised consumption site at Sandy Hill Community Health Centre. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
To Boucher's concern about individuals using pipes to consume drugs at Dundonald Park, St. John explained that the legality of smoking indoors poses challenges to providing safe places to inhale drugs.
"In the past, most of the folks were injecting fentanyl and the other drugs. Now there is quite a bit of smoking. Currently in Ottawa and Ontario, there's no safe inhalation sites, so there's nowhere for folks to actually go to to smoke drugs legally and it's really tough... [if] you smoke and that's your preferred method of consumption, you could come to Sandy Hill... but I have nothing to offer you other than the paraphernalia. So then you'll have to find somewhere to smoke."
Staffing and availability for the supervised consumption site is a challenge for operations at Sandy Hill Community Health Centre. St. John noted that the supervised consumption site was closed for almost two years during the pandemic. On the day I visited in December 2022, the site was not open to clients due to insufficient staffing. In 2023, the Oasis team is hoping to increase services from 5 days a week, 8AM to 5PM to seven days a week, 8AM to 8PM in order to serve more clients and reduce the amount of public drug use in the area.
"Alcohol is legal. You can buy it at the grocery store, but how many bad things happen every year from everything from drinking and driving to domestic abuse to people who have really, really severe alcohol use disorder. But opioids are illegal. So I think there's these lines drawn in the sand, and it's not that one thing is better than the other." - Derrick St. John (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
Sharps disposal is also available in places that are partnered with but not directly managed by Ottawa Public Health. For example, the Main branch of the Ottawa Public Library (located at 120 Metcalfe Street in Somerset ward) offers sharps disposal in their first floor washrooms. Additionally, the Health Products Stewardship Association offers a free take-it-back program at participating pharmacies. Consumers can pick up a sharps disposal box for home use, and return it to the pharmacy for disposal once it's full.
Some organizations offer their own sharps disposal, such as this one at the Main branch of the Ottawa Public Library. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
Household sharps containers can be picked up for free from participating pharmacies, like this one from 363 Rideau Street. Once full, they can be returned to the pharmacy or dropped off at a needle drop box. (Photo: Stephanie Thompson)
With many strategies available for managing hazardous waste, is there a future on the horizon in which there are no improperly discarded needles in Ottawa? Brian Boucher, the Somerset ward resident, suggested that the issue should be higher on the City's priority list, including making the efforts by Ottawa Public Health and other community organizations more prominent.
"I would imagine there's probably not being enough money spent or enough attention being paid to this issue in this city, and that's unfortunate. If somebody was out there or an organization was letting people know what the city is doing about it," he remarked. Boucher was aware of supervised consumption sites from his time spent living in Vancouver, but was not aware that these sites existed in Ottawa. "It's not necessarily publicized enough that people know that it's there," he stated when informed about the different supervised consumption sites in the city.
For Derrick St. John, the issue requires more upstream solutions.
"Drugs - it's so multifactorial, like the drugs are one piece. Inflation, affordable housing, this is the total other thing. If we're to look at a root cause analysis of 'Person X is in a shelter.' Well, it's a series of events that led to them losing their housing because they couldn't afford it. Even in Sandy Hill, to find reasonable accommodations right now, it's probably over $1000 for a room. If the City of Ottawa itself can do more to help with providing subsidized housing for people, that's probably the biggest thing - if you could grant me one wish [it] would be for the city to do what it could with that. But they're like everyone else, right? There's so many competing demands of everyone around and [the city is] getting pulled in in so many different ways."
For people like St. John, the call to help can't be ignored, even in the face of an opioid crisis, a housing crisis, and a complicated web of City priorities.
"It's rewarding work, but at the same time, it can be kind of hard."