composting bags - the new Scotties?

Imagine a world without rolled toilet paper.

The advent of indoor toilets gave rise to a whole grocery aisle full of toilet paper of all colours, patterns and grades. And toilet paper rollers to match every decor...

Here we are at a similar moment of human history: the advent of municipal food scraps composting. This is going to open the door to a flood of new consumer products.

The Bag to Earth is made in Ontario.

The patented (US #6,524,667) design makes it "totally biodegradable and compostable" using a material that is locally abundant and renewable: Canadian wood pulp.

Will more Canadian companies recognize an historic opportunity and seize this market before Frankenplastics steal the niche?

Vancouver moves one step forward on food scraps

Our city staff and elected officials need moral support. They are about to do something scarey -- but wonderful!

It's all in a staff report that will go to Vancouver City Council next week.

The report acknowledges that over one-third of our waste is compostable food scraps and food-soiled paper, that this yucky stuff produces greenhouse gases in the landfill, and that we have to get these materials out of our landfill if we want to meet our GHG reduction targets.

This means we have to change our ways, all of us. At home and at work.

The good news is that everybody I talk to is eager to change. The only complaint I've heard about the first phase of the City's composting program (which began just over a year ago) is that apartments and condos were left out.

The report asks Council permission to embark on Phase Two: a cautious pilot program.

Two percent of the houses in Vancouver, along with a small sample of carefully-chosen businesses and apartment houses, will get a chance to set out all their food scraps for composting instead of putting them in the garbage. The City will collect the composting containers every week.

The pilot will start up this fall. Once the 6-month pilot is complete and the City staff have analyzed all the data they intend to collect about the pilot program, they will come back to Council again and ask permission to go City-wide with the new program.

City Council and the cautious engineers who deliver our waste management services need reassuring words from us.

Come to Council Chambers next Thursday, 9:30 am, and let them know you are ready to take this big step.

Will BIAs lead the revolution in waste management?

A revolution in waste management might be at hand -- and the unlikely group leading it could end up being our local BIAs (Business Improvement Associations). They are the biggest customers of the garbage industry and they could drive needed change in the service mix provided by that industry.

BIAs are beginning to understand that we took a wrong turn a hundred years ago when our waste system became oversimplified, resulting in 20th Century "state of the art" waste management looking like the photo above.

Dumpsters and the monster front-loading trucks that service them are not only a blight to today's gentrifying downtowns. They are the reason that businesses in our region are laggards in recycling. Businesses using dumpsters include the property management companies in apartment buildings as well as small and large local businesses -- to say nothing of the ubiquitous construction companies with dumpsters on worksites. Together they produce 3/4 of the garbage in our region, largely because they use dumpsters instead of separating their wastes.

Five years ago a half-dozen of Vancouver's downtown BIAs tried to fix this problem by working together to get rid of the dumpster. They were following the lead of Seattle and Kelowna, which are already enjoying benefits from going "dumpster free."

Things were progressing well until the recession hit. At that point, the garbage hauler that the BIAs had signed on to deliver the new services presented a revised estimate of the cost. The current economy and failing recycling markets meant a huge jump in cost for recycling. And so the plan was scrapped.

But now there has been a new policy development.

By 2015 all those businesses will be prohibited from putting "compostable organics" in their dumpsters. This could be a total game changer.

Unlike recycling, compost doesn't rely on volatile global commodities markets. Metro Vancouver is busy putting local organics processing facilities in place. There will soon be strong, ongoing, recession-proof local demand for feedstock. There is a whole range of local uses for compostable materials ranging from soil amendments to biogenic fuel.

The requirement for separate organics collection will force the garbage industry to provide businesses with convenient, low-cost alternatives to the dumpster.

Could we see micro-scale solutions that fit with gentrified city alleyways? I'm picturing vast fleets of United We Can bicycles collecting trailerloads of fresh organic wastes from neighbourhood restaurants and produce stores and hauling them to local mini-processing plants that supply soil for the City's 2,010 new community gardens...

Giants of garbage staking claim on our organics

As reported a couple days ago, the garbage industry is recognizing that landfilling is "flatlining" and they are looking for future growth opportunities. The biggest one looming is biodegradable organics -- up to half our waste is biodegradable and there is big money to be made as local communities get serious about keeping these volatile materials out of landfills.

Already, Wall Street and the Giants of Garbage are laying claim to the territory.

Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre was their first target. It is a family owned company (mainly in the business of hauling wood chips) that has been processing Metro Vancouver yard trimmings for the past several years. The company just signed a modest contract with Metro to process 50,000 tonnes of mixed food scraps and yard trimmings. The City of Vancouver will shortly announce that they have signed a separate contract and will begin shipping mixed yard trimmings and food scraps in the spring.

This was enough for Fraser Richmond to be snapped up by a bigger company called Harvest Power.

With typical Wall Street hype, Harvest is describing this primitive little facility as "the largest composting facility in North America."

Also, Harvest Power touts itself as a company with "industry leading technologies" but it turns out Fraser Richmond is the only plant they have "up and running." And the Fraser Richmond facility is in fact a very simple windrow composting operation that has never done the anaerobic digestion process that Harvest is marketing as its key product.

Now Harvest has signed a deal with garbage giant Waste Management Inc.

Is this a sign that the garbage industry is re-inventing itself as a composting industry -- or will all this go up in a puff of Wall Street smoke and mirrors?

How about some junkets to the Maritimes?

Mary-Em Wadding of Computers for Schools wrote this about her observations on a recent trip to the Maritimes:

Hi Everyone – I just returned from a trip to the Maritimes and was pretty impressed with what I saw out there in terms of home recycling and composting options for the residents in PEI and Nova Scotia.

New Brunswick had a program similar to BC with the exception of glass, which is land-filled there. [Ed Note: landfilling glass is not so dumb. The glass we recycle is not "recycled" into new glass but "downcycled" into sand and gravel substitute. This is a complete write-off on all the energy used to create the glass. The only really good use of glass is in refillable bottles ~ as is still done by Canada's beer industry.]

My hostess in PEI had a little waste can in the bathroom and a bigger can for compost! For tissues and other assorted paper products etc, a very active green organics collection program, and their local recycling plant had a wind turbine on the roof!

All kitchen scrap is collected in Nova Scotia, and many of the fast-food restaurants have bins for both waste and compost available for consumers to use after their meals – see the photo. (not that they were used without confusion as to what went where, but I didn’t take a picture of inside the waste containers).

Perhaps Metro shouldn’t be sending politicians to Sweden to look at waste-to-energy. It seems a trip to the Maritimes might prove a better example at moving towards zero waste. If they can do it, why can’t we?

Pic: Birdseye chili

Composting dirty diapers in Toronto ~ let's get it right

In an interesting article in the NY Times last month, Oakland was recognized for its green-waste composting program. Citizens there can compost yard waste ~ and also food waste and paper napkins.

But Toronto, it turns out is even greener. They collect dirty diapers, animal waste and kitty litter along with the food waste. They send it all to a facility to be turned into fertilizer for farmlands and parks. Dirty diapers, the article suggests, are "helping Canadian crops to grow."

Which way will we go with composting?

Metro Vancouver is in the final stages of negotiations with two companies to process organics. The Recycling Council of BC has formed an Organics Working Group that will report back to its Policy Committee in June with recommendations on best practices for organics programs.

Will Toronto be our model? Will we provide composting for dirty diapers?

We will want to look at Toronto's system top to bottom before we make up our minds. The NYT article closes with a caution: "Some of the diapers may still end up in a landfill, however, due to an overuse of plastic bags in some areas served by the Green Bin program."

Because Toronto designed their program to allow folks to wrap up their compostable organics in plastic bags, the program produces thousands of tonnes of non-compostable plastic residuals each year that have to go to landfills or incinerators to be destroyed. According to a member of RCBC's Working Group who has visited the Toronto area facility, the non-compostable residuals could run as high as 21 percent of the material collected.

The plastic in diapers would meet a similar fate.

To this blogger it does not make sense to design a composting program to take non-compostable materials. I hope that our programs clearly prohibit plastics of all types.

And I hope that we go after the producers of disposable diapers and require them to take them back ~ the way we make beverage producers take back cans and bottles.

By cleaning up after Pampers and Huggies, Toronto's program will lock in the bad design in disposable diapers that makes them hard to compost.

We should instead require the producers to come up with a design that can be composted.

Pic: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times.

Economic collapse extends landfill life

Metro doomsayers can breathe easier. We may not have to ship garbage to the US after all. Economic collapse may save the day.

Last week I sent out a query to Zero Waste associates asking if anyone is seeing declines in waste volumes.

Seattle waste manager Jenny Bagby reported declines in their waste that began in December 07. Waste volumes down overall 8.3% from a year ago.

A consultant based in Phoenix said his clients are reporting dips of 10% to 40%, depending on the company's core business or the waste stream they deal with.

Jerry Powell, who publishes Resource Recycling magazine, said the bigger declines are in construction waste, but they will be seen in commercial and residential waste too.

Last week at a waste conference in Courtenay, Jerry told all the delegates something they already knew: not only is waste down, but the markets for recycled materials are "in the tank." The other end of the slowdown. Wayne Turner in North Carolina mused that landfill disposal may be "our new crystal ball."

Interestingly, while waste and recycling are down, compost volumes are not. Dan Knapp in the California Bay area noted that plants keep growing even when manufacturing is down: "Compost facilities may turn out to be more or less 'recession-proof'."

Knapp: "This could be a good argument for having compost facilities in every community instead of concentrated on agricultural lands. The tip fees and product sales from compost disposal can then act as a stabilizing force within the local economy.?

Is there a lesson here for Metro Vancouver?

Pic: Grow Cook Eat

COOL 2012 ~ sign us up!

"As communities work to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, the first place to look is in the garbage can..." This is the basis of the COOL 2012 campaign ~ Compostable Organics Out of Landfills by 2012.

The campaign is being organized by a formidable team (Grassroots Recycling Network, BioCycle magazine and EcoCycle). They say that organics composting is "the quickest and cheapest way to immediately reduce your community’s greenhouse gas emissions."

Visit their website for details.

Back to basics

Here's a picture that came today from international campaigner Bev Thorpe, who is preparing a report for the Prime Minister of Bhutan on what to do with his country's waste.

This is their only landfill and it's almost full.

The rest of the country, Bev says, is "all mountains and valleys with no flat land ... up and down Himalayan geography."

Bev reports that they are getting a composting plant up and running and that up to 80% of their waste is compostible organics (food and paper).

As this picture illustrates, "the wonderful thing about Bhutan is that they have NO hazardous waste and they have a VERY LOW consuming society."

I suggested that she advise the Prime Minister to buy a baler and bury what's left (mostly flimsy plastic packaging) in tight bales that don't take up much space. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good plan for Metro Vancouver too!

Take back the agenda

I'm just back from a conference in Australia. Where the water goes down the drain clockwise, right? Where, more to the point, every toilet is dual-flush. Drought is a subject that everyone has an opinion on, and the opinion is: something is terribly wrong and we have to do something about it.

One thing they're doing is to tackle the methane problem from landfills, one of the drivers of climate change. It's something we don't talk about enough.

Here in Canada, even in Toronto, we're serious about the producer's responsibility to recycle all those throw-away products and packaging. And that's a good thing. Extending the producer's responsibility will give the atmosphere a break by turning the tide on excess consumption.

But if all the throwaway products and packaging were banned from the planet, we would still have a big waste problem.

According to a new waste study from Metro Vancouver each of us sends 163 kilograms of sloppy wet organic wastes to the landfill each year. And that is an understatement, because it doesn't include greasy pizza boxes and a whole range of other organic wastes too awful to mention.

And what do these "biodegradable" wastes do in the landfill? They produce vast quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than the exhaust from our cars.

I came home from Australia determined to mount a mobilization to get every scrap of organics out of our municipal waste. It is something we don't have to wait for the producers to do ~ we are the producers. The problem exists because we let it happen, on our watch, with our municipal infrastructure.

Instead of hiding our food waste problem in a hole in the ground, we can follow the Australians' example. We can close the food production link, sending food waste back to nourish the land it came from. We live in a food-growing region with a lot of animal husbandry, imposing its own burden on the land and the atmosphere. How about if we work with the Fraser Valley to solve our mutual organic waste problems instead of threatening them with incinerator emissions?

Pic: BC Sustainable Poultry Farming Group

Summer blockbuster from Greenpeace USA

Have you seen Wall*E yet? Turns out Kimberley Clark is using this movie about conservation to sell its Kleenex, which contains absolutely no recycled content.

Greenpeace finds this the height of Iron*E. They've commissioned a little animated video of their own to stir up some consumer pressure on Kimberley-Clark. Check it out and send a message to Kimberley-Clark suggesting they use recycled paper. And while we're at it, lets tell them to provide composting programs for their used Kleenex and other disposable "tissue" products.

There were almost 37,000 tonnes of "tissue/towelling" in our waste last year.

pic: CBC News

Something in common

That's me in the second bed on the right. I hope I didn't breathe on any of you out there and expose you to the pestilence that has struck me down. If you get it, cancel all your meetings and go to bed.

While I wasn't sitting in the Alice McKay room last night listening to Metro Vancouver staff talk about incinerators, I was thinking about our region.

I was thinking about the dairy farmers in the Fraser Valley. The fishboats in Steveston and False Creek. The people handing out home cooked food at the Baisakhi festival. Our Chinese Greengrocer. All the coffee shops. The community gardens. The cranberry bogs in Richmond. The artisanal bakeries. The neighbourhood Tim Hortons wherever we go.

What if we just started by getting these people together to offer their pungent wastes as a community resource?

San Francisco sells compost to California vineyards. We've got vineyards. Why can't we do that?

Pic: 1918 Spanish Flu

Give us a Green Bin!

What should we tell our civic leaders at the public meeting downtown tonight?

What can they do right now, without waiting for Metro Vancouver to sort out whether to build three new incinerators or six?

What can they do to have an immediate positive impact on the environment?

The answer: give us a Green Bin program.

It is not that hard to get the sloppy wet stuff out of our gargage. Toronto loves their Green Bin program. Food waste is the main source of the greenhouse gas methane that makes our landfills one of the top contributors to climate change.

It's something we should be taking responsibility for.

We have seen the future, and it is green.

Council of Councils learn about garbage, not recycling

Gosh, if you had a chance to get all the councillors from the 23 municipalities in the Lower Mainland in the same room to learn something new about waste ~ in the context, of course, of the Zero Waste Challenge ~ wouldn't you think there'd be something to talk about besides burning and burying garbage?

But, darn-it-all, that was the opportunity squandered this past weekend, when Metro Vancouver convened the Council of Councils for its first meeting in a year.

Here we are, trying to imagine a path to a world without waste, and our regional authority responsible for planning offers three speakers who address, respectively:

• Processing garbage through mechanical and biological treatment;


• Incineration of garbage;


• Gasification of garbage.

The middle topic was dubbed reassuringly "traditional technologies" guiding the good aldermen and women into viewing striped smokestacks as benign monuments on the urban landscape. Sort of like the church steeples of yesteryear.

Why weren't the speakers talking about the next great challenge in waste reduction: food waste composting. While we're busy building incinerators, the regional district of Nanaimo has just completing a successful pilot of food waste composting.

In 2000, when Metro Vancouver was laying down $4.5 million for a hundred-year landfill, Halifax launched a full-scale composting program that cut their waste by fifty percent within months.

Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto... why are they able to not only talk about Zero Waste, but do something about it? Is it a new set of politicians we need, or a shake-up in Metro Vancouver management so they stop steering us down the path of burning and burying.

Wouldn't it be fun to get busy solving the waste problem instead of talking about ways to prolong it?

I'm coming to stay with you in September

That was the message on a notice sent out to residents of Newmarket ON to introduce "Binny," the container that the city would use to collect food waste in its new composting program.

The program started in September 2007. By November the town was diverting 78% of its waste from the landfill.

Can we do this here?

pic: http://www.wastedfood.com/2007/11/01/win-win-thanks-to-a-bin/

Composting on the Gulf Islands?

Australia's Lord Howe Island may have road-tested a solution for organic wastes on our Gulf Islands. Like the Gulf Islands, all of Australia is challenged with water and soil shortages. They needed a solution that feeds the earth instead of the sky.

Lord Howe Island is an independent principality of Australia, with around 300 locals and 450 vistors at any one time. It is also a world heritage listed region.

Here's what they are doing with their organic wastes. They installed (with aid from other levels of government) a Vertical Composting Unit (VCU) that employs a gravity-feed system to process 0.8 to 1.2 tonnes of organics a day to produce 0.5 - 0.75 tonnes of compost that locals use in their gardens. The VCU can handle all "putrescibles" including sewage sludge.

The composting program is part of a "cost efficient waste minimisation strategy" proposed in a comprehensive study done in the late 1990s.

pic: http://www.orientpacific.com.au/destinations/lord-howe-island/index.php

New decision tool measures co$t of incineration

Just when we need it, a new tool has been developed to help communities decide among different waste management options.

A ground-breaking report prepared for the Niagara Region in Ontario showed that the "true cost" of composting organics is two to four times lower than energy-from-waste (EFW) incineration.

The rigorous, peer-reviewed study used a methodology developed by Seattle economist Jeffrey Morris. It also found that disposing of organics in state-of-the-art landfills like Vancouver's, which use methane to generate electricity, has a true cost that is fifty-percent higher than composting.

The "true cost" factors in the environmental and social costs and benefits of different waste management options, allowing policy makers to make good triple-bottom-line decisions.

FROM THE REPORT:

The results show that in the case of the Region of Niagara, the ‘True Costs’ associated with managing organics are ($15.76) and $32.18 per tonne for composting leaf, yard and brush waste, and food waste respectively, $75.14 per tonne for landfill with gas flaring, 49.37 per tonne for landfill with gas recovery for electricity generation, and from $62.72 - $142.72 per tonne for EFW.

Composting grows ~ everywhere but BC!

"British Columbia was the only province where household participation in composting declined from 1994 to 2006," according to an article in Solid Waste & Recycling providing highlights of a newly released Stats Can study of household recycling practices.

The study also found that 40% of Victoria-area households compost, compared with only 23% in the Vancouver area.

The most avid composters in Canada in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, where provincial regulations ban disposal of organics from landfills and incinerators.

A regional ban on landfilling of yard waste in Metro Vancouver will come into effect on January 8, 2007. We can catch up to the other provinces as soon as households and businesses in our region have access to composting services for food scraps!

No money for composting???

At the most recent meeting of the MetroVan Waste Management Committee, Burnaby Councillor Dan Johnston was incredulous. Here's how the discussion went:

JOHNSTON: In Solid Waste planning we have said we want a process and strategies to target food composting. Is there going to be money for infrastructure included this year, so municipalities can get going? We are really keen to get going on this.

TOIVO ALLAS (staff): No, there is no money in the 2008 budget for capital for composting…

JOHNSTON: When will composting be actually implemented?

ALLAS: Well, the revised SWMP will be complete in mid-2008, it will include a schedule for implementation and budget for composting… including a capital budget, once we get the plan approved… then we’ll finalize a budget…

Meanwhile today a new government-backed campaign was launched in the UK to tackle the food waste problem, from cradle to cradle. Why is Metro Vancouver moving so slowly on composting, when the rest of the world is charging ahead?

Residential Composting Works! Being expanded...

Article in the Times Colonist, Thursday, October 25, 2007

CRD out to expand organic waste program

by Rob Shaw, Times Colonist

A pilot program to recycle organic food waste has been so popular in Oak Bay and View Royal that officials want it to continue for another 12 months while they try to lure other municipalities to join.

The Capital Regional District's environment committee voted yesterday to endorse extending the curbside pickup program -- which collects such things as vegetables, meat, fish and bones -- pending funding approval next month.

The Oak Bay and View Royal pilot programs were started last year to pick up special biodegradable food waste bags, set out alongside normal recycling bags, at approximately 4,000 homes.

Read the rest of the article...