Ottawa needs to think bigger with our green bins | Opinion

Green bins outside homes around Barrhaven. Photo by JULIE OLIVER /Postmedia

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Ottawa, the headline said, is exploring composting options and I nearly choked from the biogas. Green bin waste — compost, you know — is composed of organic or fully biodegradable materials. Stuff that rots easily. Like apple cores, chicken bones, discarded vegetables and egg shells.

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What do you mean, we need to explore new ways to get rid of those? What are we worried about, zombie carrots?

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OK, fine, maybe you’re right. We need to take this menace seriously.

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We started collecting compost in 2010, to semi-generalized dismay. I was there. I remember people complaining about maggots in their bins, before being told they really ought to clean their bins or else use liners, and then they started complaining about that. But eventually Ottawans settled into the new habit and it feels like we’ve mostly survived the ordeal.

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Not that we’re being model citizens. Our diversion rate (the stuff we’re not sending to landfill) is only 45 percent, which means more than half of what we throw out as garbage should instead go into the blue, black or green bins. Tsk.

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Alas, the city these days is mostly concerned with what to do after it picks up our green bins, not before. We have the option of continuing what we’re doing by renewing the contract with Convertus, the private company that’s turning our slop into fertilizer for local farms by heating it up and using oxygen, a process known as aerobic composting. Which seems like an OK idea, if not especially original.

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We could also look into anaerobic digestion (yum!), a process that turns green bin contents into biogas without oxygen, either in a facility we collectively own or thought a private contractor. According to the feasibility study done for us by engineering firm GHD Limited, both would be fine. So far, so Ottawa.

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But why not think bigger? Or at least dream about being a forward-thinking, imaginative city?

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In Stockholm, a truly lovely city built across 14 islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea, they use pneumatic tunnels (kind of like the tubes they use at Costco to move cash) to suck organic waste straight from buildings and bring it to collection points, where it is converted into biogas that powers city buses.

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San Francisco has a diversion rate of 80 percent and sells its compost to local vineyards. In Seoul, food waste diversion is up to 95 percent because they charge you by weight to pick up your trash, and most of the compost collected is turned into animal feel, biogas or fertilizer. Taipei is the overall winner with a truck that comes by to collect green waste modelled after ice cream trucks but playing classical music. Somehow that’s fun enough for residents to compost like maniacs.

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I’m not against the city being prepared for when the current contract with the company that composts our green bin sludge ends in 2030. It’s a good example of sensible public management. It’s also very dull. I think if we want to dramatically increase waste diversion we need to be way more forward-thinking and imaginative than what we’ve seen so far.

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I’d love to hear your suggestions. Email them to me at [email protected] and we’ll dance to the best ones.

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