Wanted: Apartment and condominium dwellers who are hardcore recyclers and want to educate their fellow tenants on the need to keep their food waste out of the regular garbage.
Murray Mollard is on the hunt to find "recycling champions" as part of a project aimed at getting Vancouver apartment and condo residents to abide by what will soon be law in the region.
When 2015 rolls around, all organic material in the Lower Mainland must be diverted from the landfill. So says the Metro Vancouver regional agency, whose waste management plan was approved by the provincial government. "This is a huge behavioural shift and people aren't used to doing this," said Mollard the co-director of a project called "Trashtalk" that was borne out of partnership with Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House, Gordon Neighbourhood House and the Recycling Council of British Columbia.
Over the past year, the city has expanded its food scraps recycling program to more than 100,000 single-family homes and duplexes. Food scraps are picked up weekly and regular garbage every other week.
But the city has yet to devise a plan to provide the same service to apartment and condo dwellers, mainly because garbage and recycling is collected by private contractors. That's where Mollard's group comes in as it uses $55,000 from the City of Vancouver's "Greenest City Fund," Vancity and TD Friends of the Environment Foundation to help implement food scrap recycling programs in condos and apartments.
The key, he said, to the program's success is finding a keen person or team of people willing to coordinate a food scraps recycling program - someone such as Michael Alexander, who organized an organic waste program at a four-building complex in Yaletown eight months ago.
Alexander, a retired photojournalist and self-described "urbanist," said about 125 of 480 families participate in the program at the Aquarius complex at Davie and Marinaside Crescent. Tenants provide their own counter top container and have access to three waste collection sites, where the bins are collected weekly and transported to a recycling plant in Richmond. "My wife and I are originally from San Francisco where this has been going on for more than a decade and we just couldn't understand why it couldn't be happening in a city that aspires to be the greenest city on the planet," said Alexander, president of the complex's strata council.
Albert Shamess, the city's director of waste management and resource recovery, said his department is working on a plan to help apartment and condo dwellers implement food scrap recycling programs before the 2015 ban.
Shamess acknowledged the city has a lot of work to do since the most recent research revealed only about 15 per cent of recyclables generated in condos and apartments such as paper and plastics is being diverted to blue bins. Food scraps diversion is even lower, he said. "We really want to find ways of trying to increase the diversion and increase the involvement, so that's what we're working on right now," he said, noting the city hasn't decided whether it will distribute counter top containers to condos and apartments, as it did for residents of single-family homes and duplexes.
The city, he added, is still unclear how the Metro Vancouver agency will enforce the ban on organics and whether the city will have a role. Apartment and condo dwellers interested in implementing a food scrap recycling program can get more information on the "Trashtalk" website.
mhowell@vancourier.com
twitter.com/flematic
