Metro searches for solution to doggie waste

The doggie toilet at Capilano River Park has rarely been used since it was installed last year.

And dog owners are still cramming the garbage bins at Aldergrove Lake Park with plastic- bagged dog deposits rather than shovelling the poop into an in- ground tank that would be pumped out regularly.

The two measures are among pilot projects started by Metro Vancouver last summer to find a way to deal with the mounting piles of dog waste at regional parks.

A third option — at Boundary Bay and Tynehead parks — where owners drop bagged waste into a dog- wasteonly red bin, has so far shown the most dramatic results, said Gudrun Jensen, operations services division manager for regional parks.

But it still involves plastic bags, and it’s messy: the waste is collected by a private company, which separates the dog poop from the plastic, sending the waste to sewage treatment and the bags to the landfill.

“Right now you’re not allowed to put dog waste in the garbage stream but everybody does because we don’t know what to do with it,” Jensen said.

About one million people visit Metro Vancouver regional parks every year. Of those visitors, about 35 per cent have one or two dogs, which every year drop an estimated 450,000 kilograms of waste — enough to fill 50 dump trucks — in the parks. And that pile of waste only includes Metro’s 22 parks, not municipal parks stretching from West Vancouver to Abbotsford.

Metro has been trying for about seven years to find a solution after waste audits found up to 70 per cent of garbage in park bins was dog waste, Jensen said. The concern is that dog waste is a hazard to park workers, because it contains pathogens and nitrogen.

“If we could deal with this one issue it would have so many spinoff benefits,” Jensen said.

She noted Metro will likely have to use a variety of measures to deal with waste, depending on the park location.

Degradable plastic bags aren’t the answer, she said, because they break down into tiny plastic bits, which means the dog waste will eventually start to decompose and produce methane.

The doggie toilet, which is akin to a sandpit, likely won’t be pursued, she said, although it seems to work better in urban areas where pets have been trained to use them. The red bin project, which costs about $ 200 a week for two bins, would be costly but “well worth it for the benefits,” while the pumpable in- ground toilet has shown modest success.

Eventually, Jensen said, the idea is to compost dog waste, but Metro doesn’t yet have a facility in place for that.

University of B. C. grad student Geoff Hill, a principal at Crescent Moon Co., who is conducting a study on composting dog waste in worm bins, said the results so far look promising. Composted dog manure, he said, would be nutrient- rich fertilizer that could possibly be used in regional parks, in planters or around new trees.