Unfortunately you've used all of your gifts this month. Your counter will reset on the first day of next month.
Every week, green bins set out for collection around Toronto are filled not just with potato peels and mouldy leftovers, but also dirty diapers.
The inclusion of diapers (and other sanitary products like menstrual pads, as well as pet waste) in the city's organic waste disposal system has been going on for two decades, since the start of the city-wide green bin program, but it remains unusual not just in Canada but North America. Most other cities send diapers straight to the landfill.
Toronto estimates six to seven per cent of household organic waste diverted from landfill is diapers and sanitary products -- about 854 tonnes a year. It's a drop in the bucket of the 725,000 tonnes in residential waste Torontonians produce every year, but we could be doing more. About 40 per cent of what Toronto residents throw into the garbage could instead go in the green bin, and a lot of that is pet waste, diapers and paper towels and tissues.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
With landfills including Toronto's Green Lane location nearing capacity and environmental harm from the methane produced by organic material rotting there, Toronto's approach seems more useful than ever.
So why hasn't it caught on more broadly?
It's part available technology, part cost and part priority.
Diapers, which typically are made from plastic and wood pulp, can't be composted the usual way -- shredding it up and letting nature do its thing outside, said Peter Veiga, the manager of waste operations for the Region of Durham.
It works great for food and yard waste, but doesn't work with plastics.
Last year, Durham Region joined Toronto and York Region in using a different type of organics processing.
First, plastics and grit are separated out and sent to the landfill. The remaining organic waste then gets made into a thick slurry that is broken down by bacteria in what Veiga described as a "mechanical stomach." The result is a solid material called digestate, which can be composted or used as fertilizer, and a biogas made mostly of methane and carbon dioxide, which can be captured and repurposed as natural gas in homes or, as Veiga is working on, to power garbage trucks.
"The only thing was really processing capacity," said Veiga of why Durham Region didn't start doing this earlier. "There weren't a lot of players with this technology around."
Toronto helped pave the way and prove the technology with their own organics processing facilities (though a tank breakdown at one location last year has meant more contracting out lately). Durham considered building its own facility, but chose instead to contract out, Veiga said. Meanwhile, York is investing in a new facility that is expected to be open in 2027.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
The technology is also better now, Veiga said, especially when it comes to concerns about smell.
Cost is one of the main factors municipalities consider, said Peter Hargreave, a long-time environmental and waste management consultant. As it stands now, the cheapest option is still the landfill -- it can cost double or more to use source-separated organics processing, he said. (Veiga says the cost works out to about the same in Durham). With so much food waste still ending up in landfills, changing that might be the priority for some cities.
Edmonton's view, for example, is that having to sort plastics from organics is "inefficient and costly," but "allowing only food scraps in the food scraps cart streamlines the composting process and keeps waste utility rates stable," said Jeremiah Gallinger, the acting general supervisor of Edmonton's organics and recycling operations, in a statement.
And it's one thing to offer a service, and another to get people to start using it. Kitchen scrap containers have become fairly standard, but Veiga encourages adding a bin in the bathroom or garage for sanitary and pet waste.
A key difference between Durham and Toronto is that Toronto will accept plastic bags in their green bins, a decision the city says is aimed at making the program more accessible and user-friendly, while Durham already required green bin bags to be compostable. Veiga says this is because compostable bags for things like pet waste are increasingly available and he wants to keep that behaviour going.
"Let's minimize the amount of plastic going into the green bin to begin with," he said.