More of Greater Victoria鈥檚 leftovers will be heading up the Malahat. As you toil over the mountain behind a truck full of kitchen scraps, you will have time to ponder how good intentions went off the rails.
This week, Saanich council approved a $4.85-million, five-year deal to process its kitchen scraps in a facility in Cobble Hill. D.L. Bins (Fisher Road Recycling) will take 8,000 to 11,000 tonnes of scraps per year when Saanich starts collecting them next spring.
The municipality had hoped to compost its kitchen waste closer to home, at Michell Brothers Farm in Central Saanich. The Michells took a look at the grief over the Foundation Organics composting site just down the road and wisely decided they didn鈥檛 need the headaches.
Foundation had been composting scraps from Victoria, Oak Bay and View Royal 鈥� until smell complaints prompted the Capital Regional District to suspend its licence. Now all that waste is being trucked over the Malahat to the same facility that Saanich will be using.
The CRD jumped into the kitchen-scrap program to extend the life of the Hartland landfill, but it did so without a guarantee of enough workable composting capacity.
It could end up building a compost facility of its own at Hartland, but Saanich Mayor Frank Leonard thinks it鈥檚 unlikely the CRD can get anything working in the next five years.
Leonard says it appears that some of his CRD colleagues are not as committed to composting as they should be. That鈥檚 an understatement.
