Residential composting only makes sense

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2022 (407 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the city’s two-year-long residential composting pilot project nears completion, I’m hoping the results will convince the city to roll out some form of citywide residential composting program soon. I’m grateful to be participating and have discovered that composting is much less of a chore than I expected. And not half as messy either.

Composting isn’t an airy-fairy wish list item. Landfills across the country are filling up fast and food scraps and other organic matter take up valuable space and don’t rot properly in a mountain of garbage. Instead they get slimy and stinky while emitting massive amounts of methane gas which heats up the earth and changes our climate.

A maze of collection wells has been drilled under the older parts of the Brady Road Resource Management Facility so that trapped methane can be piped to a smokestack and then ignited. This releases less harmful CO2 into the atmosphere and is required under the Climate Change Reductions Emissions Act.

I can now compost paper towel, meat bones and scraps. These wouldn’t go in a backyard composter. Wish-composting (when you suppose something can be composted but don’t really know) still has to be avoided.

So how do you learn the ins and outs of composting and why it matters so much? Knowledgeable and passionate enviro-team volunteers at Winnipeg Folk Fest teach attendees about composting every summer and festival-goers enthusiastically embrace the event’s on-site composting program. For many, it just wouldn’t be Folk Fest without it.

Compost Winnipeg now has 850 residential and 250 commercial clients. It began in 2016 as a social enterprise of the Green Action Centre and all the profits go toward educating Manitobans about greener living through the centre’s programs. They divert over 70,000 kilograms of organic waste from landfill every month. The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and Red River Co-op food stores are two of their biggest commercial clients.

The WRHA collects food that can only be composted because it has sat out on patients’ meal trays. The Co-op stores may have food that is nearing or at its best-before date, so Leftovers Winnipeg can first pick this up to distribute to non-profits around the city who have registered. Feeding people always trumps composting usable food in the food-use hierarchy.

Compost Awareness Week starts on May 1 and on May 7 Compost Winnipeg will be holding WastEd at Grant Park and Garden City Shopping Centres from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Their trained master composters and staff love to talk composting and can answer any questions you may have when you bring your organic kitchen waste to be composted. See compostWinnipeg.ca for more info.