Make it part of the development permit process. You must provide this service in order to get your permit. Then encourage and assist the enterprises that can provide the service (Growing City is a good example).

Keystone Cost Reduction

NOTE: Elizabeth Quinn's idea "Composting facilities for apartment dwellers." has been merged with this one.

I've been using a worm bin on my balcony for two years and it just doesn't work. The two of us eat too many fruits and vegetables for our two large worm bins to keep up with.

Yes! give apartment/condo dwellers the same use of large outside bins, like the yard trimming bins house owners use, that are REGULARLY collected just the way garbage is.

I do not understand why house-dwellers were prioritized for this when most house-dwellers/owners I know actually already have their own composting bins, since they actually have yard space to do something with it! I've had to ask a house-dwelling friend of mine to let me use theirs, because we have no access to compost through the City, and community garden sites only let gardening members utilize their compost (I'm no gardener, but I definitely want to reduce waste by composting). My 2-person apartment can generate at least an 8 L container of compost every week. I have no balcony. I need to keep this in an airtight container at home to keep from getting fruit-flies and take it out regularly.

Clear Food labels - made in Canada US made locally

Compost for Downtown condos

Concerns for all new developments with gardens. Waterloo has been requring collecting rainwater for over 20 years now.

I agree but i have submitted a way to start that .....take the apartment buildings on the west side of denman st and start the trial program in Stanley Park....this way you also reduce transporting to a site far away saving fuel ....park gardens can use the compost as well as be sold to local balcony gardeners.. I submitted this idea

Since Vancouver has a lot of apartment and condo building, this is a no brainer. Imagine all the waste that would be diverted from landfills!

It would be great to have a compost bin right beside every municipal garbage/recycling bin in the city.

My children's school just sent a note home saying they are removing the composting facilities due to fruit flies. They are to bring home their composting materials. I think this is a step in the wrong direction. Can VSB do something about this?

... and restaurants, grocers, businesses

One centralized approach to composting would be to do what Edmonton has done. They have a very impressive waste management system, where by all garage is sorted with machines to remove all recyclable waste, and then all compostable organic waste is moved into a giant composting facility that accelerates the process. The result is that only about 20% of waste ends up in the landfill (and I believe a new biofuel plant they're building is suppose to reduce it to 10%). The city also then sells the resulting compost to local businesses and homeowners.

I wouldn't limit this just to adding apartments and condos, but also to include office buildings. We found a company to service our office compost since the City didn't have such a service (we pay for this service). With the amount of coffee grounds, used paper towel, vegetable and fruit scraps that are thrown into office garbage, it would be highly adviseable to include office towers in the composting plan.

One of the things that surprised me most when I moved to Vancouver 2 years ago was the total lack of municipal composting (as well as an inefficient, frustratingly complex recycling system). In many Ontario cities, community-wide composting programs have been in place for years, and I thought Vancouver would have been ahead of the curve. It's great to see they are catching up quickly though, and I agree that multi-unit buildings are pivotal.

Check out this awesome (& poetic) booklet that was circulated with green carts when they were introduced in the City of Hamilton in 2006: http://www.hamilton.ca/NR/rdonlyres/612E94EB-AE1F-49FD-8A62-0659986D434B/0/GreenCartSmartstory.pdf

This is vitally important. Removing compostable material from landfills would reduce methane in the atmosphere. It also means more nutrients returning to the soil. This is a no brainer, we should be doing it already.

There are automatic indoor composters that don't emit much smell or use worms. They also create ready to use compost in approx. 14 days. Unfortunately, due to costs not every household is able to acquire one, and we need to make living sustainably accessible to all; which is why it really is pertinent for the government to actually step up to the plate! I agree that composting should really be targeted at high density dwellings; but I do think the most sustainable option is for these types of dwellings is to provide both composting and gardening amenities for the tenants/home owners. If we honestly want to improve our societies way of life we should be taking our cues and wisdom from nature (ie: ECOSYSTEMS).

Arthur G. - **** composters can be great...if maintained properly (which is hard, especially in a closed environment like an apartment). I had a **** composter in my apartment for about a year 15 years ago in Victoria. Trouble was, depending on my food scraps that week, the bin was either too wet (worms oozing out of the side vents...unhappy worms, not to mention the mess and smell) or too dry (worms dying). It was tough to manage. And then, the compost...I'd tuck it into the boulevards near my house, but I didn't have a balcony so couldn't use for my own plants. Then when I moved to an apartment with a balcony and started the bin again, the dramatic temperature changes meant **** composting was only an option for part of the year.

Short answer is, if there aren't more traditional composting options available, even in apartment buildings (e.g. rooftop gardens, on-site gardens, community compost sites or compost bins), I think residential collection is the best option (and arguably, more necessary for us apartment dwellers than those with yards already).

I know that residential pickup was the easiest first step (and goodness knows many homeowners don't compost), but we need to get high-density homes up the priority list for composting.

For those interested, there are several types of self-contained vermi-composting units available that can work quite well inside apartment units. (If they're well kept, they tend to be smell, mess and hassle free.) What do do with the composted materials once you have them can be a little trickier, but, if you have a balcony, some nice pot-grown tomatoes/vegetable/plants is always an option (and you get some of that urban agriculture stuff happening to boot).

All efforts to encourage and enable our community and modern society to live more sustainably are great! While having grocers compost and accept compost from their customers is a great addition to a municipal composting system, it does not provide a feasible and accessible option for everyone. I have been wanting my building to have some kind of composting facility or service, as it would dramatically reduce my house holds waste by approx. 80-90% (most of my waste is vegetable scraps). However, to save on the emissions from transporting the compost it would be better to create a by-law for multi-tenant buildings to have on-site composting. This would also allow tenants access to fertilizer for their plants or gardens; and of course I would like to see buildings with green roofs and facilities for tenant gardens (eg. community gardens).

Outreach is the key to success and city of Vancouver has no money to do that stuff, We need to do it ourselves. That is why we are starrting monthly meetings or runs to take matters into our own hands. They are the Vancouver Sustainabitiy Run http://vsrbc.web.officelive.com/