When Peter Fenwick attends the Western Regional Service Board meeting in Corner Brook tonight, he will be pitching the purchase of backyard composters for the Bay St. George area.
He is making the pitch on behalf of the Bay St. George Waste Management Committee, which he chairs, He’s also a member of the Western Regional Service Board.
Fenwick has already written Josh Carey, chairman of the Western Regional Service Board, with the request for a grant of $21,990 to purchase 1,000 backyard composters from the Multi-Materials Stewardship Board.
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He feels it’s important to push the composting agenda forward since the new tipping fees are set to come into effect in July of this year and he said there is not much in the way of plans yet for reducing the amount of organic disposal, with compostable material making up about one-third of waste.
Fenwick said the urgency for having the proposal at this meeting is that the Multi-Materials Stewardship Board offer on this reduced price for composters only stands until March 22.
The money would be used to purchase 1,000 of the $21.99 composters for resale to the householders in the Bay St. George area.
Fenwick said this could be looked on as a pilot project to see if backyard composting is a viable means of addressing a stated goal of reducing material going to the landfill by 50 per cent.
“We need to encourage everyone to start doing backyard composting until community composting or some other large scale composting comes into play,” he said.
Fenwick said this is a simple and inexpensive way to explore ways of composting and that every pound not going into regional landfills is a help.
