Green box envy

Valerie McTavish | Image: Nik West | Published: June 03, 2008

On a trip to Toronto this past winter I found myself complaining about the cold and wiping my dripping nose. As I went to dispose of my tissue, my friend snatched my hand and chastised me for not putting it in the green box. The green box? I was quickly schooled – a green box is like a blue box, but for food and other organic recycling (like my used Kleenex). Imagine the shame I carried on behalf of Vancouver when my friend discovered that my oft-bragged-about city did not have a similar curbside compostable-waste collection service.

Vancouver is one of the last of Canada’s major cities to provide its residents organic food waste removal and recycling. It is five years behind Toronto, eight years behind Edmonton, and almost ten years behind Halifax. This means that an estimated 200,000 tonnes of food waste continue to end up in landfills each year instead of being converted into useful soil. Collecting and treating the city’s organic food waste could reduce garbage by 13 to 25 per cent (depending on the restrictions imposed).

The move toward recycling organic waste became more urgent last January when the Metro Vancouver board voted to abandon its plans to find a replacement for the Cache Creek Landfill, which is expected to reach capacity in 2010. With the pressure on, Metro Vancouver can’t ignore the important role composting will play in future solutions. And yet, Metro’s Waste Management Committee seems to be taking one step forward and two steps back. In late 2007 it announced plans for a composting demonstration project at the Vancouver Landfill in Delta, but that project was scrapped before trials with food waste were concluded. Metro relocated the demonstration project to its Lang­ley wastewater treatment plant, and those trials were concluded in March.

With Metro Vancouver issuing a “Zero Waste Challenge,” the need for organic recycling is now more urgent than ever. So, why is Vancouver still stuck in the dark ages of waste removal?

Helen Spiegleman, a waste reduction activist and coordinator of Zero Waste Vancouver, blames our prim ways. “Our garbage system was created in the

Victorian era,” she says. “It hasn’t really changed since then. It’s very prudish. The reality is that garbage stinks.” Spiegleman believes that we’ve grown accustomed to the convenience of sealing smelly trash in big plastic bags and letting someone else deal with the mess.

But not everyone is afraid of getting their hands dirty; Metro Vancouver’s backyard compost program is well subscribed. Municipalities have given out 120,000 composters in the past ten years. Wilbert Yang of Metro Vancouver’s Policy and Planning Department believes this is a conservative number, as it does not take into account the units sold through retailers. According to Yang, these backyard systems divert about 30,000 tonnes of waste from the landfill each year. Not bad, but it’s only a fraction of what is possible.

So what’s stopping a city that led the way in dry recycling back in the 1970s? Well, to put it bluntly, it’s the big stink. “The main stumbling block is the smell,” says Brock Macdonald, executive director of the Recycling Council of B.C. He explains that you don’t just need land for a compost site; you need space around the land, and there is no space between communities in Metro Vancouver. “There is no place where the smell wouldn’t bother residents,” Macdonald adds.

Odour has been a challenge for many municipalities that offer food-waste collection and composting. It was the demise of a program in Squamish. Carney’s Waste Systems embarked on a commercial-food-waste collection program in 2004. The company put its enclosed anaerobic compost vessels in an area of Squamish that was, at the time, fairly industrial. Three years later, there was a Home Depot and a taxi stand within 100 metres. The facility’s new neighbours didn’t appreciate the aroma. They complained to city council and Carney’s was shut down. The facility is now in the process of being moved to the Callahan Valley in Whistler, where, as Owen Carney, the company founder, explains, “it’s miles from anyone.”

Site location is only part of the equation in creating a sustainable composting program. According to Ken Carrusca, senior engineer with the Policy and Planning Department of Metro Vancouver, there are three additional key elements; collection, processing technology, and end use of compost. As part of his work, he toured numerous facilities and saw, firsthand, the faults in their systems.

In Southern Ontario, he visited an organic processing plant in Guelph – considered trailblazing when it was built in 1996. The plant has since been shut down due to odour issues and the disinclination to repair major structural problems caused by corrosive off-gases.