The City of Regina is moving forward with a curbside organic waste collection pilot project, after council approved the test for 1,000 homes in Regina on Monday night.
"The food material, getting that out of landfills reduces greenhouse gas emissions, which is a really critical aspect for us,” Mayor Michael Fougere said.
Regina is the only city in Canada with a population of more than 150,000 people and no organic collection program.
The pilot project will look at the effectiveness of a year-round curbside organic waste collection and processing service.
During the pilot, the city plans to expand current yard waste depot service to a large single site that can operate from April to November. The pilot will start consulting experts in 2019, with service beginning in 2020 and a final implementation plan in 2021. Organic waste collection would then be introduced in 2022 or 2023 to every house that receives city garbage and recycling collection service.
The $3.5 million dollar pilot project is expected to cover 10 sections of 100 homes in the city. There will be no cost to the participants of the pilot.
Council still hasn't figured out how its residents would pay if the service was adopted for all 65,000 homes in the city, at an estimated cost of $7.9 million dollars.
Not all of council supported the move, as councillors Jerry Flegel and John Findura voted against the project.
"There’s better ways of doing this. So another bin is not an answer. What I’m hearing is, we're forcing another thing onto the resident, instead of finding out a better solution,” Findura said.
Findura suggested organic depots as a different solution.
The city says organic waste makes up about 50 per cent of residential waste and a permanent collection program could divert more than 30 per cent of residential waste from the landfill annually.
