Collection of organic waste will reduce residents’ footprints and save on Vancouver’s tipping fees
Vancouver councillor Andrea Reimer wants to encourage Vancouverites to compost kitchen scraps (photo: Dominic Schaefer)
By Glen Korstrom
Metro Vancouver and City of Vancouver regulatory changes ensure that composting will play an ever-larger role in Vancouverites’ lives.
The key change is that putting kitchen scraps in the garbage will be illegal by the end of 2012.
That’s a change spurred in part by the city’s desire to take as long as possible to fill its landfill and its business case analysis of how much cheaper it is to fill its own landfill than someone else’s.
The question is how enforceable the bylaw will be.
“Legally, you must recycle now,” Vancouver councillor Andrea Reimer told Business in Vancouver in April.
She then cited both Metro Vancouver and various municipal bylaws.
“Anything that is permissible to put in a blue box is illegal to put in your garbage can,” she said.
In 2013, the same will be true for compostable items.
The City of Vancouver has contracted Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre to collect 50,000 tonnes annually and turn it into compost. Any revenue that this Harvest Power subsidiary generates from selling compost, it gets to keep.
Port Coquitlam started its kitchen scraps program in 2007 followed by Burnaby, Coquitlam, New Westminster, Port Moody, Richmond and Vancouver, which signed on last year.
North Vancouver will launch a program this spring while other municipalities will follow suit later in the year.
Vancouverites in single-family homes now have garbage picked up once a week, whereas bins that contain both yard waste and non-putrifying, compostable kitchen items are picked up once every two weeks.
“Non-putrifying waste” is the way the city describes compostable trash that does not have any dairy, fish or meat products.
Reimer expects pick-up schedules to be reversed in 2013. Then, garbage would be picked up once every two weeks and compostables once a week.
Because the pick-up schedule for compostables would be more frequent, Vancouverites would then be able to start putting chicken bones and other putrifying compostables in their yard waste bin. The big no-no will continue to be putting any plastic bags in the container of compostables.
Vancouver garbage is dumped at the city-owned Vancouver Landfill, which is based in Delta.
“The landfill is a substantial asset,” Reimer said. “We’ve owned it for a long time. The cost of tipping in our own landfill, as opposed to someone else’s landfill, is much lower. So, we want to make the landfill last as long as is humanly possible. By far, the easiest big-volume items to get out of the current waste stream is food.”
Embarking on a composting initiative is also easier than combatting another main reason why the landfill is filling up so fast: Delta residents get to dump whatever they want for free. That was one stipulation that the city of Vancouver agreed to long ago when it started using land in Delta as a dump.
“Delta residents have six times the amount of residential garbage production than we do because they have no cost incentives to bring it down,” Reimer said.
But that’s a battle for another day.
In the interim, encouraging Vancouver homeowners to compost appears to be the best way for the City of Vancouver to meet Metro Vancouver’s goal to have all Lower Mainland residents increase the proportion of trash they recycle from 55% today to 70% by 2015.
To get there, Metro Vancouver must compost 265,000 tonnes of organics, which is equivalent to about one quarter of B.C. Place Stadium. Metro Vancouver residents currently dump about 3.4 million tonnes of garbage annually.
There are three main ways to compost:
•putting non-putrifying items in a yard waste bin;
•putting non-putrifying items in a composter that is available from the City of Vancouver for $25 including tax; or
•buying a higher-end composter from a company such as Encore.
“With our composters you can compost a whole chicken if you like,” said Encore president Danielle Knight. “You can compost cooked and raw meats – just no big bones. You can’t do a steak bone or something like that. But you can do egg shells, coffee grinds and filters and fish.”
Knight’s composters start at $780 plus HST and range up to $50,000 for an industrial-sized one good for grocery stores.
Knight founded her business two years ago, has one employee and generated tens of thousands of dollars in 2010 revenue, although some of those sales were for consulting services.
“Business is great,” she said. “We sell to and consult with stratas. That industry is something that is not hugely focused on right now due to the fact that there’s not a lot of policies in place for stratas.”
This article from the 2011 Green Edition of Business in Vancouver's Colour series.
