City eyeing spring for green cart rollout

The Curbside Organics Program is set to launch across Lethbridge later this spring. That means green carts will be wheeled out to over 34,500 single family homes along with 7500 apartments and condominiums. James Nicholls, the waste and recycling operations manager for the city, outlined the main items you can drop into your green bin.

“Anything in terms of yard waste. So if you take it to the yard waste site, you can now put it into your green cart. So again, small branches, grass clippings, leaves can all go into the green cart. And then in addition to that, you can also take all your food waste. So when we do the rollout for the phase one, we give every single user a kitchen pail that they can put under their sink or put on the counter in order to collect food waste. And then that food waste can go into the green cart. So meat, bones, anything that may have gone bad in the fridge, that can all go into the green cart when you receive your new cart.”

In the spring of 2022, the Curbside Organics Program was rolled out to 1,900 households in Lethbridge as part of a phase one approach. Stats from the What We Heard report were developed from a survey completed in the fall of last year which asked a range of question of the households involved in the first phase of curbside organics.

A total of 78.1 per cent of survey respondents said they were happy with the program with a further 15.6 per cent remaining neutral on the subject and just 6.3 per cent saying they weren’t happy with the service.

Just over half of respondents knew they would be seeing a $5/month charge for the service on their utility bill starting in the spring of 2023. Lethbridge residents that were involved in phase one of the curbside organics program in 2022 had their utility charge for the program waived until the city-wide roll out.

Green carts will be wheeled out to single unit family dwellings in the spring of 2023 and the program will be expanded to include multifamily dwellings after that.