海角社区官网

海角社区官网estimates six to seven per cent of household organic waste diverted from landfill is diapers and sanitary products聽鈥� about 854 tonnes a year. It’s a drop in the bucket of the 725,000 tonnes in residential waste Torontonians produce every year, but we聽could be doing more. About 40 per cent of what 海角社区官网residents throw into the garbage could instead go in the green bin, and a lot of that is pet waste, diapers and paper towels and tissues.

With landfills including Toronto’s Green Lane location nearing capacity and environmental harm from the methane produced by organic material rotting there, Toronto’s approach seems more useful than ever.

So why hasn鈥檛 it caught on more broadly?

It鈥檚 part available technology, part cost and part priority.

Diapers, which typically are made from plastic and wood pulp, can鈥檛 be composted the usual way聽鈥� shredding it up and letting nature do its thing outside, said Peter Veiga, the manager of waste operations for the Region of Durham.

It works great for food and yard waste, but doesn鈥檛 work with plastics.

, Durham Region joined 海角社区官网and York Region in using a different type of organics processing.

First, plastics and grit are separated out and sent to the landfill. The remaining organic waste then gets made into a thick slurry that is broken down by bacteria in what Veiga described as a 鈥渕echanical stomach.鈥� The result is a solid material called digestate, which can be composted or used as fertilizer, and a biogas made mostly of methane and carbon dioxide, which can be captured and repurposed as natural gas in homes or, as Veiga is working on, to power garbage trucks.

鈥淭he only thing was really processing capacity,鈥� said Veiga of why Durham Region didn鈥檛 start doing this earlier. 鈥淭here weren鈥檛 a lot of players with this technology around.鈥�

海角社区官网helped pave the way and prove the technology with their own organics processing facilities (though a at one location last year has meant more contracting out lately). Durham considered building its own facility, but chose instead to contract out, Veiga said. Meanwhile, York is investing in a new facility that is expected to be open in 2027.

The technology is also better now, Veiga said, especially when it comes to concerns about smell.聽

Cost is one of the main factors municipalities consider, said Peter Hargreave, a long-time environmental and waste management consultant. As it stands now, the cheapest option is still the landfill聽鈥� it can cost double or more to use source-separated organics processing, he said.聽(Veiga says the cost works out to about the same in Durham). With so much food waste still ending up in landfills, changing that might be the priority for some cities.

Edmonton鈥檚 view, for example, is that having to sort plastics from organics is 鈥渋nefficient and costly,” but “allowing only food scraps in the food scraps cart streamlines the composting process and keeps waste utility rates stable,”聽said Jeremiah Gallinger, the acting general supervisor of Edmonton’s organics and recycling operations, in a statement.聽

And it鈥檚 one thing to offer a service, and another to get people to start using it. Kitchen scrap containers have become fairly standard, but Veiga encourages adding a bin in the bathroom or garage for sanitary and pet waste.

A key difference between Durham and 海角社区官网is that 海角社区官网will accept plastic bags in their green bins, a decision the city says is aimed at making the program more accessible and user-friendly, while Durham already required green bin bags to be compostable. Veiga says this is because compostable bags for things like pet waste are increasingly available and he wants to keep that behaviour going.

鈥淟et鈥檚 minimize the amount of plastic going into the green bin to begin with,鈥� he said.