YORKTON - At the most recent regular meeting of Yorkton Council approval was given to initiate a pilot project to collect organic materials at curbsides in the city.
The concept makes sense from an environmental perspective in as much as controlled composting by the city at the landfill should reduce harmful emissions which are of concern in regards to damage to our atmosphere.
As was noted at the meeting “methane is produced when organic materials decompose in a landfill. Without oxygen, decomposition happens anaerobically which means that methane is produced. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide and contributes to climate change.”
And, if tons of organic waste – grass clippings and food waste as an example – are diverted to composting the landfill cell will last longer, putting off the substantial cost of creating a new pit for garbage.
Of course there will be the question of what a city-wide organic waste collection service will cost, and who will pay.
The pilot project which runs for only seven months and will collect from only 400 homes has a price tag of $30,000, which will come from utility reserves.
To collect from the entire city could be significantly more – depending on program details such as collection timing – and any added costs are likely to be tagged onto residential fees.
It is likely though, depending on what those exact costs are, that there will be solid support for the project given increased awareness of environmental issues these days.
In fact, Lyndon Hicks – Solid Waste and Environmental Programs Manager, with the city noted at the Council meeting, a residential refuse survey was conducted in the spring of 2021 with questions pertaining to a potential organics program. Of the respondents, 64 per cent voted in favor of an organics collection program with an additional 26 per cent responding ‘maybe depending on cost’.
While some might argue nothing a small city in Saskatchewan does will change environmental conditions – and certainly the methane produced at the landfill here would be insignificant globally, individual efforts can add up to improvement.
Of course you might ask a broader question of why we still grow lawn grass, sprinkling it with water that itself is a resource of growing worry in many places, only to clip it down with a gas motored lawnmower spewing exhaust when the water helps the grass grow. Then we have waste clippings we need to deal with too. But that is a much larger discussion to one day be explored.
As for the pilot project, it is of course never a bad thing to be proactive as a community and lead in terms of something like organic waste collection, so it’s a good news story to start 2023.
