The Capital Regional District directors have agreed to send residential kitchen scraps separated from garbage to Lower Mainland for processing while moving quickly to try to establish a local processing facility.
CRD directors endorsed a staff recommendation to award a contract of up to $4.7 million to Emterra Environmental to haul food scraps to Richmond for processing between April 2014 and December 2015, while a local solution is sought.
They also asked staff to prepare a report on interim and long-term in-region options for processing kitchen scraps as soon as possible and that the report address a request-for-proposals process for a permanent in-region solution.
The most likely place for a local processing facility is at Hartland Landfill, which already has the necessary zoning. However, directors did not want to close the door on other options such as shipping food scraps to Malahat First Nation land near Mill Bay for processing.
Malahat First Nation manager Lawrence Lewis has written the CRD saying Malahat, which currently manages a “residential soil-acceptance facility,” is ready to receive CRD kitchen scraps for the next 50 years.
“In terms of an interim option, it’s now up to us to hear from our staff what we can do,” said Victoria Coun. Ben Isitt, who has been championing the idea of a local processing facility at Hartland Road rather than paying $140 a tonne to ship kitchen scraps to Richmond.
Juan de Fuca Electoral Area director Mike Hicks, who represents Willis Point residents, spoke against establishing a composting facility at Hartland.
“As far as Hartland is concerned, I absolutely, totally disagree 1,000 per cent. We’re only doing it because we own it. We also own tens of thousands [of hectares] of watershed land. We could put it out there where there’s no people and there’s no smell [problem]. We shouldn’t put this next to people,” Hicks said.
Hicks said the closest house to Hartland is only 1,200 metres away.
“We would have to make the most state-of-the-art compost thing ever built. We couldn’t have a whisper of a smell,” Hicks said.
The CRD, which is banning food scraps from Hartland Landfill as of Jan. 1, has been left with no local place to compost food scraps collected in Victoria, View Royal, Esquimalt, Sidney and Oak Bay since it cancelled the licence of Foundation Organics in Central Saanich because of odour and litter complaints.
Saanich is not affected because it signed a separate five-year deal to compost an estimated eight to 11 thousand tonnes a year of residential kitchen scraps and yard waste at Fisher Road Recycling in Cobble Hill. That facility is not able to accept more kitchen scraps.
This is a corrected version of an earlier story.
