Council must get the ball rolling on organic recycling

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2017 (3508 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Not everybody thinks a curbside collection program for organic waste is a great idea. Even though it is.

The short but compelling argument goes like this: organic waste dumped into landfills is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions; GHGs contribute significantly to climate change; left to its own devices, climate change will ultimately make our planet unlivable.

It’s a fairly simple equation, but like so many things connected to ecology and climate change, the solutions are anything but.

Diverting organic waste from landfills is a costly and complex challenge, as is establishing a plant to process it into something that does not result in the indiscriminate emission of harmful GHGs.

It’s also potentially politically explosive, given that property owners will likely end up having to pay a wee bit more to cover the costs.

Costly, complicated and politically controversial, yes. But certainly not impossible.

Many other cities have conquered the logistics. Winnipeg is not being asked to lead the charge on organic recycling. We’re merely being asked to catch up.

So why would Winnipeg city hall have wasted the better part of the last six years discussing organic recycling without taking a single tangible step forward? That is not a simple equation.

Last week, Mayor Brian Bowman confirmed a plan to consult with the public and design a curbside organic recycling program has stalled out.

The result is a program that has really been under serious consideration since 2011, when the city tabled a master plan for its waste and recycling programs, is indefinitely delayed.

What exactly happened? Be cautioned: a close examination of the events of the last six years or so is a disheartening experience.

Coun. Jenny Gerbasi, who chairs the city’s climate change working group, said council originally planned to launch a pilot organic recycling program in 2011 and then, if everything went well, it would go city-wide in 2017. For reasons that are not immediately apparent, Gerbasi said the pilot program never materialized.

That eliminated a valuable opportunity for the city to test drive the logistics of curbside collection and reprocessing of organic waste and get a firm and accurate estimate of the costs.

Flash forward to February 2016, and despite having abandoned the pilot program, council discovers the administration is preparing to do a public consultation on curbside organic recycling. It’s a contentious issue, so council does what it does best: it freaks out.

At its April 2016 meeting, attempts were made by several councillors to divert the organics program into a much bigger review of all waste and recycling programs.

A few diehard supporters managed to beat back those efforts and instead got support for a more urgent timeline for consultation on — and design of — a program to collect organic waste.

That timeline would see a plan for public consultation presented to council in August 2017, and a proposed design for an organics program to divert organic waste from commercial, industrial and institutional producers by October.

In December, armed with an actual program, the city would then conduct an extensive public consultation and review on its entire waste and recycling efforts.

Gerbasi said the motion did not solve the biggest challenge. “The fact is that a majority of council was not in favour of this. The motion was all about allowing councillors to say they were still doing something important, when they were just stalling it.”

Coun. Brian Mayes, chairman of the waste and water committee, said he believes the organic recycling file got caught up in confusion around the work of Gerbasi’s climate change working group.

Mayes suggested this caused some to wonder if it made sense to proceed with organics outside the broader consultation and planning for other climate change initiatives. That became a powerful excuse for those who wanted to vacillate.

Mayes said there was also some confusion around the issue of a carbon tax. Shortly before council passed its April 2017 motion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau served notice he was seeking a national framework for the introduction of a carbon tax. Late last year, Trudeau got the support of most provinces and territories for a plan that would impose a national carbon tax in any jurisdiction that could not come up with its own tax regime.

Mayes said this should have been a call to action at city hall. The city could theoretically be on the hook for significant new carbon taxes if it is not successful in diverting organic waste from its landfill sites.

“Frankly, the carbon tax will have a huge impact on the cost benefits of this,” Mayes said. “We have to stop dumping our organics into the landfill, or else we’re going to have to pay through the nose when the carbon tax finally arrives.”

Can the organic recycling program be saved? Mayes, Gerbasi and even Bowman believe it can, although none of the three politicians has so far been able to articulate a firm plan for moving it forward.

Organic recycling makes so much sense, both from an environmental and fiscal point of view. Whether it is to combat climate change or avoid a huge carbon tax bill that property taxpayers will ultimately have to foot, it’s an idea for which the time has come.

Unfortunately for the supporters of organic recycling, it must find more support at council, a forum that has never been known for having an abundance of sense of any kind.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca