Starting on Jan. 1, the Capital Regional District will be banning kitchen scraps from all garbage pickup, which means most of the West Shore is going to have to arrange their own disposal of organic waste.
Residents of Langford, Colwood, Metchosin and Highlands are all currently responsible for paying for private garbage pickup. They will have to decide whether they want to compost their scraps in their yards, feed the garburator (an option strongly discouraged by the CRD) or pay their current contractors extra for roadside pickup.
“It’s a pretty reasonable cost to do it right now,” says Langford Mayor Stew Young. He thinks about 50 to 60 per cent of Langford residents will likely sign up for the bin, though he emphasized that backyard composting or garburating are cheaper.
Determining what the best option is will vary between municipalities and households, however.
“Colwood has a lot of septic users,” says Mayor Carol Hamilton. “And I’m not sure that garburators are the best way to deal with it.”
The CRD officially announced its date for the kitchen scraps ban back on Oct. 8, but there hasn’t been a lot of community buzz around the decision, adds Young.
“The CRD was supposed to do an education thing, and it’s unfortunate that they didn’t start that three months ago,” the mayor said.
He adds that the City of Langford has no plans to actively remind residents about the ban apart from information on their website. “This is a CRD driven program. It’s not municipal. They’re the ones that put the ban in place, and there’s no point in taking tax money to advertise when the CRD is already doing it.”
Young says the CRD had already assured the City of Langford that it had started advertising the upcoming ban.
“It’s been kind of a soft launch that started quite a while back,” says Hamilton. “It was always announced, but if people haven’t been paying attention, there might be a bit of a rough transition.”
View Royal residents can expect no change to their service, as the municipality already contracts with a private service provider to collect garbage and kitchen scraps.
For more information, visit crd.bc.ca.
acowan@goldstreamgazette.com
