Vaudreuil-Soulanges starts food waste collection for composting

Tracy Gallacher has been composting for years.

“I’ve been doing it since I moved here 19 years ago and it takes a little bit of thinking to get it right,” she laughs.

So she was thrilled when authorities in the town of Hudson, where she lives, decided to offer curbside collection of food waste.

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Hudson is just one of the municipalities in the Vaudreuil-Soulanges area that is offering this kind of service, starting this fall. The town began a week ago after brown bins and other material were delivered to homes earlier in the month.

It’s part of a plan in Vaudreuil-Soulanges to reduce the amount of food waste sent to landfills. That fits into a broader provincial effort to recover up to sixty per cent of organic waste by 2020. Gallacher is relieved because there are limitations to what she can put in her compost box at home.

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Only food waste is allowed in the brown bins.

Next week it’ll be Vaudreuil-Dorion’s turn to start offering the service.  It’s the kind of initiative that town authorities say is inevitable. The aim, after all, is to reduce the amount of garbage.

“Eventually, the bin for the garbage will be very, very small, and we’ll collect it every two or three weeks,” Mayor Guy Pilon tells Global News. “You will have one big blue bin for recycling, one bin for compost material and a very small one for the real garbage.

Gallacher agrees that there is simply too much waste and still too many people don’t realize how much is thrown out.

“Fifty per cent of what we throw in the garbage can be reused in a different way,” she says, pointing out that the material is good for gardens.

All it takes, she says, is a bit more effort.