Tackling Vancouver's food waste

Two years ago, Meeru Dhalwala and Vikram Vij, disgusted by the amount of food thrown out every night at their two busy Vancouver restaurants, decided to start composting.

It wasn’t cheap, but they wanted to do the right thing.

“Suddenly, four months later, we started having a mice problem,” says Dhalwala. “It dawned on us that there was basically a buffet out in the alley.” They removed the plastic food waste bins, and the mouse problem went away.

With residential kitchen waste pick-up now underway in Vancouver (along with six other municipalities in the region) an even bigger challenge will be tackling this waste in the commercial sector -- places like restaurants and supermarkets that deal with huge volumes of food each day.

“Commercial businesses are certainly the largest source of organic waste in the region,” says Andrew Marr, a senior engineer with Metro Vancouver. According to Marr, the sector produces about 95,000 tonnes of food waste every year.

Although a pending hike in garbage dumping fees could make composting more financially attractive for businesses that have to pay for waste services, cost is not the only hurdle they have to overcome.

Dhalwala chalks up their mouse problem to the fact that they used plastic bins, instead of metal dumpsters, for food waste. When they called sustainability consultants at The Green Table for advice, they heard other restauranteurs were having the same problem.

Jaime Hunter, manager of The Boathouse, says her restaurant is conscious about keeping food waste to a minimum. But when they looked into paying for a food waste disposal service, it was too expensive.

“If it balanced out, for sure we’d look into it again,” says Hunter. “But I’ve also heard from others that they hadn’t mastered the containers. They were finding flies, rats, pests like that to be a problem.”

Businesses on Granville Island, an early adopter of food waste composting, haven’t had any problems with rodents, says the island's communications director Scott Fraser.

“Our organics bins are standard dumpsters, metal, clearly labeled as organic waste,” Fraser says. “Those are emptied on a schedule, several times a day.”

But Granville Island restaurants and businesses share one administration – the Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation – and have one central waste depot. That economy of scale makes it cost-effective to have large metal dumpsters and daily pick-up.

This system allows “more flexibility than an individual restaurant,” says Fraser.

City farmer Michael Levenston runs a website and a hotline dedicated to composting and other urban agriculture issues. He hasn’t heard any rodent horror stories from restaurants, but does say composting on a large-scale is a step-by-step process with many bugs that will have to be worked out.

“These last two years have been huge, first to have a company be licensed to take food waste, secondly to have Metro [Vancouver] and so many cities buy into pick-up of food scraps,” Levenston says. “I see the whole thing moving forward.”