It's icky, it's stinky and often stomach turning. But when it comes to the peelings, sopping paper towels and food waste that we churn out from our kitchens, it is no longer garbage. The concept of reducing our garbage-to-landfill habits through kitchen scraps collection is now at the hub of those changes.
Municipalities across Metro Vancouver have jumped on the organic recycling bandwagon, and fast. Port Coquitlam was the first, in 2007, to start a kitchen scraps program, and has been joined in the past year by Burnaby, Coquitlam, New Westminster, Port Moody, Richmond and Vancouver.
The aim is to take another chunk out of our landfill addiction, which saw cities in the Lower Mainland end up trucking a large portion of its garbage to far-away landfills and incinerators.
Concerns about the environmental impact and financial savings pushed these changes, Port Coquitlam mayor Greg Moore said.
His municipality is now taking the gameplan into multi-family buildings.
After a successful introduction of the kitchen waste program, PoCo council voted in February to be the first to expand the program into multi-family complexes.
"Each multi-family project is different, so we have to approach them with that in mind," Moore noted. Accessibility for pickup and commitment of stratas and residents will shape the city's response to individual complexes that choose to participate.
Getting the "yuck" out of your garbage, however, doesn't need to be unseemly.
"It's all about perception," said Moore, "but the reality is that people want to do this. We call it the 'yuck factor' - and we've piggybacked ideas like adding newspaper to the kitchen waste collection to help deal with these concerns."
Food waste is known for its less than attractive odour. It's also been known to attract bugs, flies and pests like raccoons and skunks, to name a few. So how to encourage people to stop tossing it and instead, to put it aside for organic waste pickup?
New Westminster's Jenny Lee grabbed her garden-variety community newspaper and made a compostible solid container simply with a few folds.
"It's just folding a newspaper and turning it into a container, really. It didn't take long to design and it can be done in a matter of seconds - at no extra cost."
When folded, the paper units can contain nearly one kilogram of waste. She's thought about people's apprehension about storing kitchen waste for New Westminster's green bin program, and how as the weather gets warmer that apprehension will turn to upturned noses.
When popped into the green bin, the smaller containers do exactly what they were designed for - contain the smell. The PoCo website offers information on how to fold newsprint into a helpful pail liner, Moore added.
On average, Metro Vancouver multi-family residents divert 16 per cent of their household waste away from landfills. Port Coquitlam's rate for single-family residents has achieved a diversion rate of approximately 63 per cent. While the overall goal for Metro Vancouver is 70 per cent by 2015, the biggest challenge was how to incorporate multi-family dwellings.
