Why does The City of Calgary subsidize the sale of composters?
The City of Calgary’s long-term goal is to reduce the amount of waste going to landfills to just 20 per cent and recycle or recover 80 per cent of waste materials by the year 2020. Currently, the numbers are the other way around: 80 per cent of waste goes into the landfills and 20 per cent is recycled. Recycling food and yard waste is key to reaching 80/20 by 2020. Placing organic materials such as yard, fruit and vegetable waste into a landfill uses up valuable space and contributes to global warming. Unfortunately, a landfill isn’t a giant compost bin. Materials buried in the landfill get densely packed, depriving them of oxygen. They still break down but without oxygen the decomposition process produces greenhouse gases. Therefore, the more organic material that ends up in the landfill – the more greenhouse gases are released in the air. Food and yard waste consist of over 40 per cent of garbage from our homes, which makes landfills one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases in
