Containers for food waste will be showing up soon for Medicine Hat residents participating in the Food Waste Collection Pilot Program. (Ross Lavigne/CHAT News)

By Jesse Gill

Food waste collection pilot program in Medicine Hat rolling out in April

Mar 14, 2024 | 1:08 PM

The City of Medicine Hat is rolling its Food Waste Collection Pilot Program out in April.

This will include about 25 percent of residents, according to a city official.

Food waste is being included in the current yard waste collection program for some of the higher participating areas of the city, who will have buckets for food waste showing up soon.

Shane Briggs, waste and recycling manager with the city said you can put them under your counter and throw your food waste, bones and whatever you might have after the packaging is off.

LIVE UPDATES

Road construction, detours and traffic in Medicine Hat

9h ago

Mortgage changes to help first-time home buyers in Medicine Hat

Sep 17, 2024

SMILE SUNDAYS

'We're all one': Hatters bond over classic muscle car

Sep 15, 2024

“Then you just dump it in your regular yard waste collection cart to be collected on your normal collection day,” Briggs said.

Detailed instructions and information including a frequently asked questions guide are expected to arrive in the next few weeks for those participating.

The Recycle Coach app can also be downloaded to help understand what it’s should and shouldn’t go in the bin.

Briggs said food waste makes up 35 percent of the current waste going into the city landfill.

“The overall goal is to make the landfill last longer, the capacity,” Briggs said.

“If we went city wide with the program, that’s why we are doing a pilot first of all, just to see if it is you know feasible if the public is going to own it and want it,” he added.

“April 8th the pilot will get rolling.”

Susan Antler, executive director with Compost Council of Canada is happy to see Medicine Hat piloting this initiative.

“I think there is a lot of civic pride in Medicine Hat. I think in terms of the opportunity to show Canada how to do better,” Antler said.

“It has to focus on getting the organics away from landfill,” she added.

“Landfills are the number two emitter of methane gas over 80 times as powerful or as nasty as carbon dioxide, and it’s preventable.”

Denise Phillipe a senior advisor for the National Zero Waste Council, an initiative of Metro Vancouver says that 58 percent of the food we produce goes to waste.

“It’s terrible. There are enormous resources in terms of water, soil, labour, energy that support processing, manufacturing, picking food. All of that is lost if food ends up in compost or landfill,” Phillipe said.

“That preventative piece is a strong message that needs to happen in conjunction with a curbside pickup program,” she added.

There is an opportunity to educate consumers around how to reduce the amount of food waste at home according to Phillipe, with about 40 percent of food loss happening at the household level.

“Best before dates are one of the leading causes of why we waste food at home in the first place,” Phillipe said.

“We think that peak freshness date actually means health and safety date in which it doesn’t. Then food ends up in those compost pails.” she added.

“It gets picked up at the curb doesn’t go to landfill. That’s great. But we’re still wasting food that could have been prevented from in the first place.”

Residents of Medicine Hat can expect to get surveys for both those participating and not.

Briggs says it’s important to get those back to the city.

“We’re taking just so much date from this pilot,” Briggs said.

“We’ll look at that and determine at the end of the year if it was feasible, and then again with the people, the outreach that we do with the people if they want it, then it’ll end up going before council for approval.”

The pilot program runs until the end of December with potential for mass adoption of a city-wide organics and composting program dependant on it’s success.