Calgary satisfied with green cart pilot project
Posted Jan 21, 2016 7:33 am.
Last Updated Jan 21, 2016 7:36 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
In a little over a year, the city of Calgary will roll out green bins to all single family homes, to collect food and yard waste on a weekly basis.
A pilot project is already underway in Abbeydale, Brentwood, Cougar Ridge and Southwood, where the city is seeing a participation rate of about 75 per cent.
Stats from the city show those people who are taking part are putting about 40 per cent less garbage in their black bins.
Phillipa Wagner, leader with green cart implementation, says despite concerns before the program started, they’ve received very little negative feedback since.
“Their concerns were alleviated just by starting to use the program,” she said. “When we’ve done surveys, we’ve shown that there is 91 per cent support for a citywide program and 89 per cent of the people are satisfied with the program as it is now.”
One of the catches is that the black bin for household garbage is only picked up once every two weeks, but Wagner says they haven’t had a lot of complaints on that front either.
The total cost of the project when it rolls out citywide will be $26-million and that already accounts for the savings from picking up the black bins less often.
There will be a small fee associated with it, but Wagner says what that will be hasn’t been figured out yet.
