As Ottawa’s residential Green Bin Program gets underway, local businesses are left to decide whether or not they want to carry the extra costs involved with composting organic waste.
Bin delivery for the residential program began this month and will continue through December. Organic waste pick up will begin in January with hopes to reduce the amount of residential waste dumped at landfills by 45 per cent.
Small businesses involved with Ottawa’s yellow bag program will also be offered organic waste pick up through the municipality. However, only businesses that create waste levels similar to those of a residence qualify for the yellow bag program. Larger businesses will not be offered transfer services through the city.
Municipalities are not mandated to provide waste management services for industrial, commercial and institutional sectors, says Chris Wood, the project co-ordinator of Green Bins.
But the City is trying to remove barriers, such as higher costs, that would prevent businesses from composting their organic waste, he says.
Wood says, “it’s a matter of whether they’re long term thinkers or not,” whether they want to spend the money now or later. Eventually, the landfill will start filling up and the price of dumping will rise with it, he says.
Orgaworld Canada, the company that owns Ottawa’s new compost facility, will also try to attract members of Ottawa’s industrial sector, he says.
The facility can accommodate up to 100,000 tonnes of organic waste a year and the residential Green Bin program won’t use up that space.
This summer Hartman’s Your Independent Grocer at Bank Street and Somerset Street participated in a six week trial with Malex – a company that recently began offering a commercial composting service.
General manager Robert St-Amour says the program didn’t work well for them.
The store produced six to eight bins of organic waste a day and sometimes more than 20 over the weekend.
Despite regular pickups on weekdays, St-Amour says that too much waste had to be stored over the weekend and it attracted too many fruit flies.
He says there needs to be a system that can accommodate huge volumes of organic waste created by big stores, adding that the higher cost of composting is unattractive to most business owners.
If some of the issues St-Amour encountered can be resolved – he’ll take another look at composting organic waste produced at the Independent.
“I’d prefer to keep it revenue neutral if at all possible, but we’re certainly willing to do our part,” he says.
Anne Robinson, a waste diversion project manager with the City of Ottawa says, ultimately, “it’s up to the business to decide how they want to treat their garbage.”