Oak Bay to try at-home food-scraps composting
Pilot program with 50 participants is start of efforts to reduce collection costs
Fifty Oak Bay residents will be given an opportunity to compost their kitchen scraps at home this year as part of a pilot program to see if there are less expensive alternatives to the current food scraps pickup.
“We’ve always asked staff to look at innovative ways to save money. We’re spending $250,000 right now on the organic kitchen scrap program for Oak Bay alone,” Mayor Nils Jensen said.
“Our contract [for kitchen scraps pickup] runs until the end of 2017 and staff wanted to see whether there’s a way we can either eliminate that or can we reduce the cost,” he said.
By running a pilot, the municipality can see whether it’s feasible to offset collection costs or even move almost entirely to backyard composting, Jensen said.
“It depends what the evaluation is. Is it cost-effective? Are people likely to use it in significant numbers so it will reduce our costs? We want to look at all of those questions before we launch into a major program.”
Just how the 50 participants will be selected hasn’t been decided by staff, he said.
The municipality has budgeted $35,000 for the pilot.
The municipality plans to pilot the use of compost tumblers that Jensen likened to large raffle ticket bins. They are fully sealed containers that can be rotated to mix the composting materials. The sealed container also helps contain the heat generated by the composting process.
“One of the things that we found with the older program with the black bins was that they attracted rats and many people were reluctant to use them. So this is a new system that is sealed [and provides] compost in three or four months.
Oak Bay has been a leader in the region when it comes to kitchen scraps. It began testing separate collection of kitchen scraps from other garbage in some parts of the municipality in 2006 — bringing the entire municipality into the program in 2014.
The CRD decided in 2012 to ban kitchen scraps from Hartland Landfill entirely in 2015, as part of an effort to extend the life of the landfill by diverting waste for recycling.
But the CRD’s food-scraps program has not been without its hiccups. After signing up with Foundation Organics to compost waste in Central Saanich, the CRD was swamped by odour complaints.
The firm’s licence was pulled in 2013 and the CRD started trucking collected organic waste out of the region to Richmond for processing.
In January, CRD directors agreed to a two-year contract with D.L. Bins Ltd. to haul and process kitchen scraps. The Central Saanich company has said it will haul and process some of the scraps at Enviro-Smart Organics in Delta, but also identified Fisher Road Recycling in Cobble Hill as another site for processing.
It is estimated that without diverting kitchen waste from the region, the landfill would be full by 2035. With the kitchen-scraps programs, it is expected to last until 2047.