Greetings,
Im looking for research, studies or information that looks at why residential households might not choose curbside collection of organics for composting over other disposal methods, i.e. backyard composting, landfill, sink garbage disposal or other.
The City of Olympia has a voluntary subscription (fee) based curbside organics (all food waste, food-soiled paper and yard waste) collection program. Waste Studies show there are still significant enough quantities of organic wastes disposed in the landfill to warrant diversion efforts. After enhancing our curbside yard waste program last year to include all food waste we increased the number of customers subscribing to organics, but still have less than 50% of households subscribed. We need to learn what the barriers are for the non-subscribers. Before embarking on focus groups and a professional survey we wanted to conduct a literature search first.
Any information surrounding curbside food waste collection programs and why people dont participate would be greatly appreciated.
Ron Jones
Sr. Program Specialist
City of Olympia
United States
www.olympiawa.gov
Looking for Research on Barriers to Curbside Organics Collection over other Disposal Methods
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Some anecdotal evidence for you from the UK. In the area I live we have FREE kerbside collection of food waste, recyclables (paper, cardboard, plastics, cans, etc.) and non-recyclables which is collected in three separate bins.
The food waste is collected once a week and sent to an in-vessel composting site and garden compost produced. This is bagged and sold on by the composting company, although some is available free to households in the district at certain times of the year.
Overall take up of the scheme seems to be good most of my neighbours put their food waste bins out for collection each week, but from talking to people who dont recycle food waste in this way, it is usually because they find the compostable bags the waste has to be put in too expensive. The waste can be wrapped in newspaper, but this means the bin can get dirty quickly, and as the bins are large they are then difficult to wash out. A trial of smaller bins is to start this year. Other reasons might be Im not sure what food waste I can put in the bin, Ive run out of biodegradable bags, or householders do their own composting.
Hope this is useful!
Joanne Chamberlain
United Kingdom
We live in rural Victoria (Australia) and don't even have a garbage collection service. It has made for some very interesting methods to get rid of garbage.
Composting is one way we got rid of over 2/3 of our rubbish, and we have two bins going which take about 8 months each to fill up. The breakdown rate is quite amazing, even in winter.
Recyclables are taken to the tip about one every two months, such as bottles and packaging. Things like newspapers are reused in the garden for mulching.
Garden waste such as tres are either cut up for firewood and the smaller branches mulched up and reused on the garden. Weeds are tossed into a container and left to stew for months then reused for fertilizer.
Other foods where there is a lot of packaging, we have simply stopped buying them. Home cooked cakes instead of biscuits for example.
It's taken a while to get there and I still have a small bag, once a fortnight, which does go to a relative's house as she does have a rubbish service
Sally
sally dickson
Australia
Hi Ron
Dominic Hogg of Eunomia Research and Consulting in the UK presented on household organic waste collections (among other things) at NZ's last WasteMINZ conference. He had a lot of very interesting observations based on studying this across UK & the rest of Europe. His summary of the conditions for high food capture were frequent collection of food waste (collected separately from green waste), residual collection less frequent than food waste, type of container for food waste (needs to be vented with liners).
Best separation results were for weekly food waste, fortnightly residual, and there were also comments about whether to collect food waste together with or separate from greenn waste - his conclusion was separate colections as this also increases capture, allows for differential charging (he had some great information on how charging regimes affect collections also), and focuses the more expensive treatment on the food waste only (as opposed to collecting with green waste and hence having to treat the whole lot as for food waste, more expensive).
I'm sure if you googled his name you would find much more information.
Barbara
Barbara Hammonds
Taranaki Regional Council
New Zealand
Ron -
Have you talked with the folks at King County, and in San Francisco? I think that in San Francisco, only about 40 percent of single family residences are participating in the green cart program. Here is an article that I recently wrote about SF's promotion of curbside food waste collection (it was BioCycle magazine's March cover story): www.jgpress.com/archives/_free/001833.html
If you email me, I can provide contact info for people interviewed in the article.
As for King County, they also have a variety of promotions. Check out their website: "Recycle Food. It's Easy to Do," and the TV and radio ads: http://your.kingcounty.gov/solidwaste/garbage-recycling/recycle-food.asp
Again, I can help you out with contact info for people in KC as well.
I'd like to hear more about your program in Olympia (I wrote about it in Oct. 2007, but lost touch with the progress).
Rhodes
Rhodes Yepsen
Associate Editor
BioCycle magazine
United States
www.BioCycle.net