Vancouver residents are well on their way to meeting Metro Vancouver’s recycling target of 70% by 2015, according to Vancouver councillor Andrea Reimer, who is the city’s lead contact for its Greenest City 2020 Action Plan.
Metro Vancouver hosted its first Zero Waste conference March 10 in Burnaby, where attendees discussed the regional government’s plan to launch an aggressive communications campaign, using social media and smartphone apps, to boost recycling.
Metro Vancouver aims to have all Lower Mainland residents increase the proportion of trash they recycle from 55% today to 70% by 2015.
“The last statistics I saw showed that, in Vancouver, we’re at 58% recycling on the residential side.” Reimer told Business in Vancouver last night. “That includes construction waste. With food scraps, we would get much higher because about 35% of our waste stream in organic material. If we can figure out how to get that out, we’ll be at 70% no problem.”
The City of Vancouver initiated a three-phase program to limit waste last spring. The first phase involved using yard waste bins that could contain compostable waste but no meat, dairy products or other things that would smell. The bins are being picked up once every two weeks.
Reimer hopes the next phase can be implemented this year. It would entail those bins being picked up once each week and enable them to have so-called “putrefying” waste.
The final phase would initiate composting bins and pick-up for businesses.
“Communications campaigns are great,” Reimer said of the Metro Vancouver initiative. “Even if you have the carrots and the information, eventually there needs to be a stick component. You don’t want the stick at the front end, but there has to be some threat at some point in order for people to start making these shifts.”
Metro Vancouver will ban residents from trashing kitchen scraps next year and ban businesses from doing the same thing in 2015.
Fines are expected to be in the $200 range.