Some Metro Vancouver households can leave food scraps at curb for composting
Some residents of Coquitlam, Delta, Langley Township, and West Vancouver can now leave food waste at the curb for pick-up.
Almost 3,000 single-family households in designated neighbourhoods are able to put out food scraps with their yard waste as part of a demonstration project, which launched this week.
According to a press release issued today (October 6) by Metro Vancouver, the project is scheduled to run until the end of March 2010.
The release states that many municipalities in Metro Vancouver plan to introduce “full-scale” food-and-yard-waste collection programs in the fall of 2010.
Each year, about 190,000 tonnes of food is thrown in the trash in the region, according to Metro Vancouver.
Meat, fish, fruit, vegetable, and dairy scraps put out for pick-up will be composted at Fraser Richmond Soil & Fibre’s southeast Richmond facility.
The resulting soil and mulch products will be sold to landscapers and other buyers.
In Toronto, 510,000 single-family households can leave organic waste at the curb for composting, as part of that city’s green-bin program.
The program is being expanded to 5,000 apartments, condos, and co-ops, according to the City of Toronto’s Web site.
You can follow Stephen Hui on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenhui.
Comments
2 Comments
monty
Oct 7, 2009 at 7:28pm
Stunned. Dumbfounded. Just read this press release. The neanderthals at MetroVan. forgot to mention containers. We already have raccoons arriving in the dead of night and to sit in the hot tub, coyotes on the prowl, odd looking spiders lurking about. What next? Bears descending on mass from the hills. It is the smell that attracts them. And this is one smelly decision.
monty
MikeP
Nov 5, 2009 at 2:01pm
Monty, your comments dont make any sense. This program is diverting food scraps from the garbage container to the yard waste container - the two containers sit side by side on the curb - its not like anyone is saying HEY , start letting food rot all over your house and then toss it to the curb. Its all sitting out there now, just in the other can, there's nothing in this program that causes and INCREASE in the waste stream, just sends it to a different place - a place where the organics can be put back into the earth as compost and their value reclaimed instead of going to a waste transfer station, being trucked to a landfill, and buried to rot in the ground and generate methane.