New food-waste drop off stations launched in Winnipeg

Keeping food waste out of the landfill just became a lot simpler, starting Tuesday you can help reduce climate change by simply dropping your food waste items in one of 15 compost bin locations across the city.

“Since 44 per cent of your household waste is organics, and if that’s ending up in the landfill, if you think about it that’s twice as much waste going into our landfill and it shortens the life span of our landfills, so it’s just good responsible waste management practices,” Karrie Blackburn, sales & customer service lead at Compost Winnipeg.

For every tonne of food waste kept out of the landfill, two tonnes of carbon dioxide are kept out of the atmosphere. The city and Compost Winnipeg created this food waste drop-off system for local residents to use until the city-wide Green Cart program is introduced in about five years.

“We can accept vegetables, as well as fruit scraps, cooked or raw, we can also accept meat, bones, and dairy, also paper packaging can all go in these bins.”

A full list of acceptable and non-acceptable items can be found on the city’s website, and are accessible 24 hours, seven days a week at all locations. 

“We’re monitoring the bins very closely to ensure they’re not overflowing, they remain cute, so we’ll be collecting them weekly or more frequently to ensure they’re not overflowing, so lots of space for all of your organics,” said Blackburn.

“I like to remind people, when was the last day you threw nothing away? This tells me that every day we have an option to have better responsible practices.”

Compost Winnipeg will also be working with a team of caretakers to keep the sites clean and accessible, and are hopeful to add more drop-off stations if the launch goes well.