Green organics bins have seen a successful debut

Salford landfill site will greatly extend its life span with this diversion program

When the City Of Woodstock, along with the township of SouthWest Oxford, began its composting system on Jan. 1 -- to divert a long list of items from the Salford Landfill -- it was certainly going to be a wait-and-see on successful stories and compiled statistics

What is a percentage of households using the new system?

What is the total weight diverted from the county's landfill?

How will the average family utilize the program, and it certainly depends on whether you're in a house, a multi-family apartment, or a farm?

The County of Oxford has just released its numbers and noted that over 300,000 kg of organics had been diverted from the actual dump over the first 3 months.

I would say that warmer temperatures for easier access to bring your new green bin to the road (curb) should improve the numbers as time moves forward. We have a lot of snow to deal with this past winter.

I think residents have to also get used to something new as Woodstock is now on a 6-zone schedule, so sometimes it's practically 9 days between pickups (Friday the 13th to Monday the 23rd; example). The crew gathering up the recycling is from Emterra, who have been hired by the provincial government as a third-party service. The City crew picks up the tagged bags and the organics -- often in a truck with two sections in the back.

I have included two more fast facts as noted from the Oxford website.

As a quick backgrounder, I'm a city council member from Woodstock (2nd term), a member of the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority (UTRCA) board for 7+ years, and have been assigned by the City to the Environmental Advisory Committee (WEAC). Therefore, I have a strong belief in words like recycle, reuse, reduce, repurpose, and divert from landfill so that the Salford facility will continue to serve all in Oxford for another 30+ years.