City’s organic trash talk taking too long

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/08/2015 (3875 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every year Winnipeg drags its heels on curbside organic-waste collection, Manitoba looks bad as a climate-change scofflaw.

According to Environment Canada, the second-largest producer of greenhouse gases in this province remains the city’s Brady Road Landfill, which generated 425,100 carbon-dioxide-equivalent tonnes of GHGs in 2013.

The only bigger polluter in Manitoba is the Koch fertilizer plant in Brandon. Brady Road is expected to hold on to its No. 2 status in 2014, even though the city has started capturing and flaring off some of the methane generated by the dump.

This is because a large proportion of the waste that winds up at Brady Road is household organics, most of which is kitchen scraps.

When organic waste breaks down aerobically — that is, in the presence of oxygen — the decomposition process generates carbon dioxide. This is what happens in a properly maintained backyard composter.

But when organic waste breaks down anaerobically — below the ground, where there’s no oxygen — the decomposition generates methane, which is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas.

This is the main impetus behind the push for curbside organic waste collection in Winnipeg, one of the last larger cities in Canada that doesn’t ask its residents to separate their vegetable peels, coffee grounds and steak bones from the rest of their trash.

Curbside organics collection is standard practice in larger centres such as Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto and Halifax and smaller cities such as Guelph and Barrie, Ont. Winnipeg finally made a commitment to begin exploring the idea in 2011, when council approved a waste-minimization plan that called for a curbside organics-collection pilot project in 2014 – and city-wide collection by 2017.

As the Free Press reported, the city didn’t conduct that pilot project. It only started looking for a firm interesting in carrying out the pilot this year, with an eye for the experiment to be conducted in 2016.

By July 2016, Winnipeg solid-waste experts expect to hand city council a report outlining a range of organic-waste-collection options, with pricetags attached.

What this means is Winnipeg won’t have curbside organics collection in place until 2018 at the very earliest – and still has no firm commitment to ever divert organic waste from Brady Road.

This places Winnipeg in the unenviable position of being a climate-change offender in an area where it clearly has the ability to reduce its carbon footprint.

In a perfect world, every household would have a backyard composter. But the reality is, backyard compost piles can’t deal with more noxious forms of household organics, such as dirty diapers and kitty litter.

Hence the need for some form of city collection, which would either send household organics to an industrial composting facility or a high-temperature furnace.

Mayor Brian Bowman sees this as desirable.

“I do support the idea of an organic program. I would have rather seen we were doing one before I came to office,” the mayor said Tuesday in an interview. “I think it’s smart on a number of levels, in terms of reducing the amount of waste at Brady, but also the environmental benefits.”

The mayor did not, however, offer a firm commitment toward organic-waste collection. That’s because the city is still waiting to hear what a private consulting firm has to say about the technical aspects of organic-waste collection – and is also seeking public opinion about what form of program Winnipeggers are willing to support.

“Let’s see what evolves in terms of the feedback we get from Winnipeggers,” Bowman said.

Nonetheless, solid-waste engineers already have a good idea about the range of organic-waste-collection options out there, thanks to the work of other Canadian cities.

But with the pricetag expected to be steep, the city is moving cautiously. It may also lack the internal capacity to move on this file right now.

Winnipeg has been without a permanent solid-waste manager since September 2014, when Darryl Drohomerski left the city. The water-and-waste department has also been without a permanent director since April, when Diane Sacher went on leave.

Most residents would agree it doesn’t make sense to allow kitchen scraps to rot underground when this stuff could be converted into compost or energy. The city ought to do its best to move more quickly on the organics file.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca