Will green bins get a green light?

In most cities in Ontario, it's common for garbage bins and blue bins to have a buddy standing out on the street with them at the end of the week: the green bin. London is currently an exception. But the City of London conducted a Green Bin Pilot Project last year that may give green bins the green light.

The pilot project ran from October 2011 to October 2012. Approximately 760 homes were given green bins. During the summer months, separated organics along with garbage and recycling were collected on a weekly basis; in the winter it was reduced to biweekly collection.

"We tried to pick a community that was representative of a crosssection of London, so a variety of housing types and age groups, and we've found out that we got pretty typical numbers of what you expect for most places in Ontario. We found that about 50 to 60 per cent of the people were actively participating in the program," said Wesley Abbott, division manager of solid waste management for the City of London.

The results from the pilot project will be officially presented to council in May, although Abbott said the City is already aware of their preliminary findings. "It's been considered and discussed for a period of time, and it's a difficult choice for the elected officials, because when you have a program that only 50 to 60 per cent of the people are going to participate in, a significant dollar impact to it, and the fact that we have a gas collection system ... there are some trade-offs there."

The gas collection system Abbott is referring to is at our landfill site. When garbage decomposes in a landfill site, the food waste that decomposes creates landfill gas, which contains methane. Our gas collection system captures over half of the gas. Diverting the food garbage, however, is a better option for the environment.

"So out of the households that participated, you probably get about 200 to 300 kilograms of organic materials a year to divert ... you end up diverting about 12 to 15 per cent of all the waste stream," he said.

The pilot project also discovered what was being placed in the bins, and yielded very positive results. "We got very clean material, we did some audits of the green bins — we found that 97 per cent of the stuff was stuff we wanted, which was food waste or non-recyclable paper, and about three per cent were contaminants ... people use plastic bags and things like that," said Abbott.

Although it seems late for London to be considering a green bin program, Abbott said that it's never been as urgent an issue for London as it has been for other cities across Ontario.

"Other municipalities were quick to adopt a green bin program because they were running out of landfill space; for example, York and Toronto didn't have a landfill site for a period of time and were shipping garbage to Michigan. They were looking at any way possible to divert waste. In London we have a well-run, safe landfill site and weren't shipping our garbage to the States, so we have more time to think of what is the best way to go."

Environmentally conscious Londoners don't have to wait for green bins to start diverting waste from local landfills — check out the City of London's guide to composting at home at tinyurl.com/ldncompost.