Pet owners hoping to include their pet’s waste in their green bins will have to continue to scope up the poo after a pilot project pointed out the limitations of the City of Airdrie’s current recycling provider.
“Our current processor said they simply can’t accommodate the feces because of the increased risk of parasites,” said Kathleen Muretti, manager of Waste and Recycling Services.
“If they were to accept it, they’d have to segregate it and treat the material separately to keep the quality of their end product up and that’s just not something we can do.
“The City has a very favourable disposal rate with the processor so we wouldn’t want to risk increasing that significantly or having to go to another processor who perhaps could do it but for a significantly increased cost.”
Muretti said the City looked into the costs associated with going with a processor who could process pet waste and the increase – passed along to residents – would be 35 per cent, which she said “wasn’t something that was palatable.”
According to Muretti, another issue was ensuring the City had a backup if the recycler it currently uses has an issue.
“If anything happens to where we’re taking our organics we need to be able to take that somewhere else, so we need to be careful – because once you put something into the program you can’t pull it out,” she said.
“(We couldn’t find) a secondary place to take (pet waste).”
The pilot project was announced June 8 after an online contest was held to pick which communities would participate. The pilot project ran from June 15 to July 31 and pet waste, excluding cat litter, was accepted.
Residents of Prairie Springs, Luxstone, Coopers Crossing, Morningside, Hillcrest and Windsong won the right to participate in the pilot project after receiving 30 per cent of the online vote.
Feedback from residents was largely favourable, according to Muretti. A total of 93 residents responded to a survey sent out at the end of the pilot project, with most indicating the ability to dispose of pet waste in their green bins was easy and convenient.
The City’s organics recycling program was launched in April 2014 and has proven to be very popular and successful, according to the results of a survey conducted in November 2014 by Bannister Research and Consulting, and presented to council on Jan. 19.
Since the organics program began in 2014, Airdrie has diverted four million kilograms of organics that were destined for the landfill.
According to Muretti, the ability to include pet waste in organics recycling will be revisited in the future.
“As processes change and more communities, especially when Calgary has the facilities to look after their organics, we’ll have more opportunities for different programs and different disposal sites,” she said.
“As those disposal sites get more competitive, there’ll be a bigger market for us to select from. Whoever has the biggest variety of acceptable materials at the lowest rate is how we would select who our disposal is.”
The City of Calgary will have its organics recycling facilities up and running by the third quarter of 2019, according to Muretti.
