Green bin program to cost Calgary households $6.50 per month
Posted May 30, 2016 8:17 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The city is gearing up to haul away green waste, including kitchen scraps and dog poop, as it prepares a city-wide roll out of the green bin program mid-2017.
The catch is it’s going to cost households about $6.50 per month
The latest report on Calgary’s green bin program is going to City Hall Monday, and the argument for the costly program is that not rolling out the program will cost Calgarians more in the long run.
Coun. Richard Pootmans says the city needs to do a better job explaining the cost of landfills over their life cycle which is anywhere between $50 and $100-million.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi agrees.
“What we’re doing with the green cart is we are taking what would be a very, very large capital cost in the future and deferring it by composting the materials, but that does mean there’s an operating cost,” he explained. “So we’re paying a little bit more per month but in return, we’re saving millions and millions of dollars in the future.”
Pootmans adds the city also loses out on a lot of tax revenue when it has to set aside huge areas of land for garbage, rather than developing it.
“When we commit a section of land, several hundred acres or more, to landfill, we’re not putting people living there, we’re not collecting tax,” he said. “We haven’t even begun to calculate the tax loss.”
A green cart pilot is ongoing in the communities of Brentwood, Abbeydale, Southwood and Cougar Ridge and city polling shows almost 90 per cent of single-family households support the program city-wide and the same amount plan on using it.
The city has a self-imposed goal of diverting 70 per cent of waste from landfills by 2025 and according to this latest report, as much as 60 per cent of residential waste currently going into landfills could be composted.m
