Committee supports adding bags, pet waste to green bins
The city thinks it can increase the diversion rate of organic waste from 40 per cent today to 63 per cent by 2023 if it allows residents to put dog feces and plastic bags into the green bin, but some councillors can’t support a new deal without seeing evidence underpinning the forecasts.
Councillors Jeff Leiper and Catherine McKenney voted against the contract changes on Monday, but seven other members of the environment committee backed a staff recommendation to expand the green bin program.
If ratified by council on Wednesday, residents will be able to collect their organic waste in a plastic bag and put it in the green bin for weekly curbside collection by around mid-2019.
It would mean the city would have to pay Orgaworld more — the average household would pay another 15 cents each month — but city staff say there’s a good chance more residents will participate in the green bin program, further extending the life of the municipal dump on Trail Road. A dismal 51 per cent of Ottawa residents are currently green bin users.
Leiper said he would have been willing to accept a regime that allows compostable plastic bags, but not ordinary plastic bags. There’s no proof linking plastic bags to increased green bin use, he said.
“We didn’t see the evidence today that it would,” Leiper said after the committee meeting. “Let’s hope that staff aren’t going to be too optimistic about participation again.”
A consultant helped staff make the projections, but the consultant’s report hasn’t yet been released publicly. A business case has also not been released.
The city has already been burned for being too optimistic on the green bin program, as the 2014 audit on the Orgaworld contract revealed. Auditor general Ken Hughes discovered a galling lack of evidence to support the volume of organic waste committed to Orgaworld in the 20-year contract.
Hughes looked at the latest staff analysis to make sure they did their homework this time and is satisfied with the facts that support the revised deal.
The auditor highlighted one unfortunate, and unalterable, reality under the contract: The city pays more per tonne to process leaf and yard waste at Orgaworld compared to unloading the material in its own composting heaps at the municipal dump.
Still, the city is trying to eliminate throwaway costs to Orgaworld under the current deal. As part of the revised contract, the city ’s “put or pay ” threshold would be reduced from 80,000 tonnes annually to 75,000 tonnes. The city has never sent Orgaworld 80,000 tonnes since the beginning of the contract in 2010 but pays for that volume of organics.
Some public delegates who addressed the environment committee are skeptical about allowing plastic bags in the green bin.
Barbara Long of the Community Associations for Environmental Sustainability said the group had been hoping the city would consider a ban on single-use plastic bags, as Montreal has done. The City of Ottawa is now at risk of being “out of step with the rest of the world,” Long said.
Dan Martens, a board member of the Biodegradable Products Institute, which certifies compostable items, warned councillors that if people are allowed to use regular plastic bags to collect organic waste, they might treat them as regular garbage bags, inviting contaminants into the organic waste stream.
Orgaworld is already not producing top-grade compost from Ottawa’s organic waste, city staff told councillors. Plastic bags and dog feces could further impact the quality of the compost. It would be up to Orgaworld to strip the plastic from the organic waste and send it to the dump.