This gardening season, the City of Kingston encourages residents to:
– Grass-cycle – leave clippings on your lawn – and use yard waste as mulch in your garden to allow organic nutrients to be absorbed and help reduce the need for watering.
– Use a backyard composter to turn your yard waste into valuable compost for use in your garden.
“Grass-cycling and backyard composting are the most environmentally friendly and cost-effective way to treat yard waste. Using your green bin for food waste and feeding your yard waste to your yard also saves taxpayer dollars,” says Heather Roberts, manager of solid waste.
The cost of processing yard waste through the green bin program was one of the reasons that led to the recent change in the Waste Bylaw which, as of May 1, requires residents to show that they are using the green bin for food waste (and not only yard waste).
See CityofKingston.ca/GreenBin for details on this change.
GRASS-CYCLING AND BACKYARD COMPOSTING SAVE TAXPAYER DOLLARS
The green bin was always intended as a way to capture food waste. Grass-cycling or using a backyard composter for grass and other yard waste – instead of putting it in the green bin – saves taxpayer dollars. It costs approximately:
– $90 a tonne to rigorously process organic waste collected from the green bin program.
– $35 a tonne to process yard waste brought to the Kingston Area Recycling Centre, 196 Lappan’s Lane, or picked up during fall collections.
Interested in grass-cycling, mulching and other water-wise gardening tips? Visit the Utilities Kingston water conservation webpage.
Release source: City of Kingston | Photo: Pixabay (pd)
