Good news on the Garbage Front

Like any good Canucks Fan, I am adept at climbing onto, and getting off of, bandwagons . Many sports fans are like that with the home team, excited when they go on a win streak (remember last May and all the moth-eaten Habs Jerseys that came out of the closet for a few hours?) and dejected when the news is less good.

So it is with me and New Westminster City Hall. They build up my faith, only to occasionally knock it down. However, this week you can consider me “on the bandwagon”. I attended the Brow of the Hill Residents Association meeting last night, and the Supervisor of Solid Waste and Recycling for the City was talking about the Clean Green collectors and automated trash collection roll out.

He brought good news: The City is collecting a lot of organics, more than 8 Tonnes a week. The clean green bins are being used heavily, and there is a measurable decrease in the volume of trash going to “garbage” right out of the gate. There were some predictable roll-out issues, but they seem to have a good plan for addressing them, and are dealing with complaints on a house-by-house basis.

Best news I heard: they are considering making smaller Clean Green bins available (essentially, buying some green lids for the 120L bins). This is good, as it was one of the nagging complaints NWEP had during the announcement of the program. For those of us composting and otherwise reducing our trash footprint, it will be nice to not have the 240L Green behemoth in the back yard.

And speaking of my backyard, I also managed to secure a demo Green Cone organic waste digester. I am hoping to get it up and running in my back yard this weekend. Stay tuned, I am really interested to see how well this thing works for the stuff that can’t go into my compost.

They are also ready to swap my (so far, completely unused) 240L garbage bin for a slimmer, trimmer 120L model. I will be taking the trash out for the first time in a month next week.

This is the year.

One comment on “Good news on the Garbage Front

  1. Hey that’s great! I’m glad to hear other people are using their green bins as much as we are. We did compost already, but with the addition of cooked food and cardboard food containers, the new green bin is awesome.

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