Wellington County is willing to promote backyard composting and also to help people learn to do it, but it is refusing to build composting facilities anytime soon.
County council on Sept. 24 voted to accept a resolution from its solid waste services committee “to further encourage and promote backyard composting in order to maximize the diversion of organic materials from the landfill in a cost effective and responsible manner and the initial budget estimate to develop the master composter program.”
Committee chairman said the recommendation came after the committee considered a letter from Minto council, supported by Wellington North council, to consider composting facilities.
Wilson said, “We’ve looked at that proposal many times.”
He said it is “prohibitively expensive.”
Wilson said finding a site for a composting facility would be “more onerous than for a landfill.” Wellington County once spent a dozen years seeking a dump site, and never did find one.
Wilson said each composting site would cost about $1-million, and another $300,000 a year to run each of them.
“I don’t want to be responsible to put that on the county taxpayers,” he said.
Wilson noted that the county has encouraged backyard composting of organic materials since the 1980s, and Kathy Wiebe is a master composter who can teach that skill to residents. He said in the past, her classes were well attended.
Minto once had an informal composting operation, but when the county took over waste management, it had to be shut down. It had no formal approvals.
The solid waste services committee report noted that Wellington County has distributed 12,000 backyard composters over the year, and the committee decided to reinstate the master composter program.
That is designed to increase the number of residents using composters, and the county is to collect data on how many people are composting, as well as determine the needs of residents in order to be successful.
The report said the county can make backyard composters available at reasonable cost and sell them by the truckload or offer them at waste sites.
