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Bring us your chicken bones and your pizza leftovers. Vancouver yard-trimmings carts will now take all biodegradable material

September 10th, 2012 · 45 Comments

It will be officially announced tomorrow, but after more than a year of testing out organics recycling in a couple of neighbourhoods in Vancouver, the city is now going to move forward to phase 2 — letting everyone start dumping all food products in their yard trimmings bin.

Here’s an explanation of what is allowed in the yard trimmings/organic waste carts in the pilot neighbourhoods (Sunset, Riley Park), which will now be what we can all do.

Here’s my blog post from April when I did an early story about the success rates in the pilot program, showing that the city was getting a 50-per-cent recycling rate — considered good by the standards of many cities.

The one thing still to come in the organics recycling is a change in garbage pick-up. For now, the pick-up will remain as is: yard bins every second week, regular garbage every week. At some point (once the new trucks and carts arrive), it will reverse.

That will be the true test. People who continue to throw food scraps in regular garbage will find it gets kinda smelly kinda fast. Other municipalities doing this already have found they end up with some cranky residents who don’t want to get with the program and don’t like running mini-rendering plants out in their garbage cans in the lane.

Will Vancouver be different? We are sooo green, aren’t we? We’ll see.

 

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