District of Sechelt council agreed to extend curbside organic waste pickup in Davis Bay beyond the pilot project’s revised Dec. 26 expiry date, but will take another month to decide whether to expand the service to the whole District.
“This decision has to be made within 30 days, but it doesn’t have to be made in 30 minutes,” Mayor Bruce Milne said during council’s Dec. 17 meeting.
Launched in May and first set to expire at the end of November, the pilot project was aimed at 500 households in Davis Bay, with participation peaking at 362 households, chief financial officer Victor Mema reported to council.
The program accepts food scraps, food-soiled paper and yard waste, diverting it from the landfill by trucking it to Salish Soils for composting.
In a late October survey of 89 people who used the service, 76 out of 77 respondents said they liked the program.
While the pilot project has been funded from general revenues and is estimated to cost about $72,000 (minus savings from reduced landfill tipping fees), Mema recommended funding the District-wide service through user fees.
“User fees are estimated at $9.04 per month or $108.48 per year per household. However, after taking into account possible savings from reduced solid waste pickups, landfill tipping fees and Multi-Material BC rebates, the fee could be reduced to $1.50 per month per household or $18 per year per household,” Mema said in his report.
The estimated upfront cost for equipment and hardware is $325,000.
Mema recommended continuing with the Davis Bay pilot project, rolling out a District-wide program on April 6, 2015 and charging a pro-rated service fee to impacted households for 2015.
Council, however, went only with the first recommendation and deferred consideration of a District-wide program to the Jan. 12 finance, culture and economic development committee meeting. A council decision is expected before the end of January.
During the discussion, Milne raised the issue of households that do their own composting, asking Mema if there was “a way to provide an opt-in for participation, so those who are actually looking after their own needs don’t have to participate?”
Mema said he could factor that model into an implementation plan, though “there are difficulties of doing it either way.”
Meanwhile, Gibsons Recycling Depot (GRD) started accepting food scraps on Dec. 21 after months of trial testing a commercial composting unit, Green Mountain Technologies’ automated Earth Flow system.
The new drop-off service, offered for free during the holidays, comes with a fee of $1 for a five-gallon pail of clean food scraps and less for smaller containers. For GRD’s “Pay As You Throw” curbside customers, there is no additional charge.
Co-owner Buddy Boyd said GRD is coming at the issue of organic waste from “a totally different perspective” than large-scale compost processing facilities.
“Ours is about getting this stuff out of the waste stream by home composting first, then offering solutions for businesses, then institutions, then local scalable industrial composting,” Boyd said, adding he was “super stoked” about introducing the new service.
