A commentary by a Saanich resident.
I heard with concern about Saanich’s plan to charge for dropping green waste at the municipal yard. I use the drop-off program extensively to handle green waste in volumes and types not suitable for either composting or bi-weekly cart pickup. Instead, we are being encouraged to compost at home and use our organics cart. I don’t think these are viable alternatives, nor do I support another user charge.
We compost at home, and as a result have little use for our organics cart — we freeze meat scraps that shouldn’t go in the compost bin and only put the cart out every two or three months — so we don’t get much value from the $35 we pay for the smallest green cart.
However, we have 12 oak trees on our residential lot, and as a result we put out 130 barrels of oak leaves for the leaf collection program. That program is very valuable to residents of areas with oak trees!
Over two or three months, we also hauled at least another 32 barrels of acorns and branches not suitable for either home compost or leaf collection.
That was four pickup loads — $60 if they are charged at the proposed $15 a load. This doesn’t include another four loads or so per year of cedar prunings and other material not suitable for composting.
Let’s look at the option of using the new 240 litre cart for nearly $100. My barrels are 120 litres, so 32 barrels would take 16 collection days using the 240 litre cart, spread over 32 weeks.
Meantime, I would need to store the contents of all the barrels in a large pile somewhere – for nearly eight months! That leaves four months to dispose of the other eight months’ worth of prunings. Something doesn’t add up here. I understand the desire to reduce what’s done at the municipal work yard. Have other models been considered? For example:
1. A curbside collection model. Two hundred feet away from me in Oak Bay, mixed green waste piles are picked up in spring, in addition to a leaf collection program similar to Saanich’s.
2. A distributed model — e.g. with containers placed in parking lots at parks. Too much cross-contamination? What about doing that only periodically, with staff supervision?
As a retired environmental manager, my professional experience says we should be doing everything we can to encourage organic material to be collected separately from garbage. Organic material is a valuable resource. I cannot believe that introducing another user charge is the only or best solution.
I look forward to hearing some fresh ideas about how to approach this issue.
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