Back in May, when council rejected a request for $10,000 to study the feasibility of using the Gore Composting method to process Bowen’s domestic organic waste-on island, the Knick Knack Nook stepped in with funding. The resulting report, written by Mateo Ocejo of Net Zero Waste, says that setting up a composting facility on Bowen could save money in comparison to shipping it off, but that the small scale does present challenges to its cost-effectiveness.
“The green waste collected from residences on Bowen is not weighed, but I had to assume that 1,000 tonnes of waste could be collected per year, even though it is probably somewhat less than that, currently,” says Ocejo, who spent a day on Bowen touring potential composting sites and also the recycling depot. “The smaller the volume of waste you are processing, the higher the cost. But when you consider future growth as well as buy-in and other opportunities that come up as the system starts running, it is fair to say that the amount of waste the community has to process will increase over time.”
Ocejo says that he recommends that municipalities trying to get more organic waste out of the regular garbage system conduct a waste audit.
“You take ten homes at random and open up their garbage. By weighing the garbage, you can estimate how much organic waste is in there,” he says. “From there, when the garbage is collected you have the collectors leave what we call a love-note to the residents if they do things like wrap their organics in plastic, or throw diapers into the green bin. The note explains why they did not pick up the bin – this is part of the education process.”
Ocejo says that as the composting facility starts operating and churning out a high quality product, buy-in tends to increase.
“When people are the beneficiaries of the high quality fertilizer produced from this process, they tend to consider what they’re putting into it more closely. You start peeling the stickers off your fruit before you throw them into the bin, you stop throwing your banana peels in the garbage.”
The city of Abbottsford started running a Gore Composting facility in January of 2013, and diversion rates from the regular waste stream increased monthly for the first six months. The system is also predicted to save the city $300, 000 in its first year of operation.
In his report, Ocejo says that after donating 500 yards of finished compost and soil products to schools and community groups on Bowen, more than $20,000 in revenues could be generated through the annual sale of compost and soil products.
Ocejo says that composting facilities of a similar size are up and running (in Sechelt, and Cumberland) but if Bowen were to go forward with creating a composting facility, it would be the first island to do so.
“Both Pender and Saltspring are looking into this system, because the costs of shipping waste to the mainland is going up alongside ferry costs,” says Ocejo. “Bowen is a step-ahead. Moving forward would require public support to make the investment, but it would pay itself
off quickly.”
“By composting locally, Bowen would save approximately 12 percent per tonne of organic waste compared to the current cost of shipping to the North Shore Transfer Station. Also, of the estimated $143,000 it would cost to run such a facility, two-thirds of that would go back into the local economy through job creation.”
Ocejo recommends that the municipality put forth a request for proposals in order to get more solid financial figures on the costs of such an operation.
Peter Taggart, who alongside Councilor Cro Lucas first proposed this composting method to council says he hopes that the municipality follows through on this step.
“We can spend a lot of time doing hypothetical financial analysis of this, but what we really need to do is find out if there is anyone interested in taking this on, and move forward from there.”
