Are you ready for a ban on food scraps in garbage by 2015?
The planned ban on organics is a problem that Metro Vancouver politicians are trying to grapple with, weighing the cost of exempting older apartments from the ban and letting private operators that run them to truck their food scraps to a place where it would be separated and then disposed of.
There would be benefits to this; for one it's an acknowledgement that these buildings don't have anywhere to handle food waste and another it would stop waste being trucked by private haulers out of the province, which the pols don't like on philosophical grounds.
There may, however, be another solution. But it is costly: Metro Vancouver just outfitted an older complex it operates with a $30,000 machine that turns food waste into compost. The question is can the region convince people that reducing waste is worth the effort and the money?
MetroVancouver's pilot in Coquitlam may be a solution but we'll have to wait and see if it's the right one.
