PureGin.org

Here in rural Cedar / Yellow Point, we've had weekly curbside pickup of food-waste for something over a year now. Some stats have recently been published which I found quite interesting. In case you don't know, the idea of the curbside food-waste pickup is to separate 'garbage' into multiple 'streams'. Everyone is probably practicing 're-cycling' to some extent - separating materials such as paper, aluminium, ferrous metals such as 'tin cans', and plastics, from 'garbage'. Food-waste pickup takes this one step further, separating the 'garbage' into 'organic waste' (food scraps, paper food packaging, waxed cartons), which is composted, from the non-compostable material. This remaining 'garbage' is generally sent to the landfill or other special disposal facilities. Yard waste (leaves, grass and shrub clippings, branches) are often dealt with separately, often seasonally.

What remains of the non-compostable 'garbage' typically consists of mixed material products, which can't easily be separated into recyclable components. This includes items such as light bulbs, composite packaging such as 'tetrapaks' and foil/plastic blister packs, non-recyclable plastics such as Styrofoam, toxic materials, and bio-hazardous materials.

It turns out that our collection route (Cedar) has the lowest per-household household food-waste collection rates. I suspect from our personal experience that this is because much of our organic waste is already diverted to compost. The only organic wastes which we can't compost ourselves are things such as paper food packaging and waxed cartons. Consequently, we put out a meagre bag of food-waste, plus a couple of cartons, per week - I'm sure we could share our green curbside food-waste bin with four or five households similar to ours.

However good we may feel about composting, and reducing our garbage and re-cycling streams, it's still /too much waste/. RDN's admirable goal is zero waste, which is admirable, and ambitious. I'm totally on board...