The Regional District of Kootenay Boundary’s (RDKB) kitchen food waste collection for compost pilot project in Valmar may be extended to the rest of Grand Forks.
City Council recently approved the expansion of the project at a city council meeting on May 28.
The pilot project began at the end of January for residents in the Valmar area and has seen a big change in the amount of waste that is being sent to the landfill.
Mayor Brian Taylor recently went on a tour of the Valmar area and found that there was a high level of satisfaction with the program.
“There were very few people who weren’t participating and the impact on shipping fees was dramatic,” he said. “Our garbage to the dump dropped dramatically so it’s a really big savings as well. We are moving forward and we are planning to extend that to the rest of the city.”
City Council has given the project a green light to move forward with the rest of the city, but there are still a lot of steps that will need to be completed prior to full implementation.
Taylor noted that there will need to be public consultations and there is not a set timeline for when it will occur.
“People are going to ask questions,” he added. “There was a lot of preparation that went into making Valmar a successful project and we have to take the same care when we introduce it to the rest of the city.”
“Prior to the pilot program being implemented, we monitored the amount of garbage that has come out of that subdivision and we kept that total separate. We had just over a ton of garbage coming out every week,” explained Tim Dueck, RDKB’s solid waste program co-ordinator. “The average amount of garbage that we now collect from these residents is just under a ton every two weeks. We have reduced the amount of garbage by half. Every week we now collect under a half a ton of kitchen scraps. If you do the math, it’s pretty much the amount of garbage that is missing.”
Green bins and small beige kitchen buckets were distributed to residents at the start of the project for homeowners to separate garbage and food scrapes.
Items such as facial tissues, wet newspapers, meat scrapes, disposable diapers, kitty litter and dog excrements can also be placed into the green bins.
Dueck pointed out that through waste composition studies, they found that roughly 50 per cent of what is currently being thrown into the garbage is recyclable and already has a recycling program.
“We know that between 38 and 42 per cent of our garbage right now is material that could and should be composted, which we call organic material. That’s what we’re targeting for this food scrapes recycling program,” he said. “The people that are the keeners and right on board tell us they have half a bag of garbage every two weeks.”
The RDKB’s waste collection contractor, Kettle Valley Waste, is collecting the green bins every week using a split-body truck, while garbage and recycling is collected every other week.
What Dueck hopes is that people start to ask what the meaning of garbage is and to change the way they dispose of items.
“We’re asking people to look at their garbage and determine whether it should be recycled, composted or returned to another recycling program or whether it has no further value,” Dueck said.
However, the purpose of the program isn’t aimed to discourage people from backyard composting.
“If people are already doing that, we’d say please continue doing the backyard composting,” he added. “There are some materials you probably wouldn’t want to and should not compost in your backyard, such as meat scrapes, which can attract bears and dogs, and that’s the stuff that we want.”
Though everyone has been enthusiastic about the program, Dueck noted that the biggest complaint about the program is the cost of the paper bags.
“The cost of the bags that we use and distributed with the green bins when we launched the program, are 30 cents for the small kitchen catcher bag and 80 cents for the larger green bin,” he said. “If people are totally grossed out by the whole thing and want to buy both those bags, then the cost to the homeowner is more than what they would experience. The decision to use the paper bags is something that each person has to decide.”
Though it won’t be available immediately, Dueck notes that the compost will eventually be sold back to the public.
“We still need it for our operations,” he said. “At this point its safe to say that it’s more economical to use that material that we get on site. It’s our intention to make this product available but at this point we still have lots of use for it.”
The compost is used as a cover for the landfills at Christina Lake, Rock Creek and Beaverdell.
“We have to responsibly close the landfills so the composted materials are very good for two things: it’s a great growing median for vegetation and final cover, and the second thing is that the microbes in the compost are really good at eating escaping methane,” Dueck explained. “The whole purpose of diverting organic material from landfills is to mitigate the escaping methane. To get the compost to eat the escaping methane is a bonus.”
The organic waste is dumped in with the yard and garden waste composting program that the district already has in place.
