Le français viendra sous peu.
The City of Ottawa recently released its 2023/2024 Four Season Waste Audit. The Audit analyzes what’s in our garbage and green bin, and how we’re doing on waste.
The Waste Audit is part of Ottawa’s Solid Waste Master Plan, which was approved by City Council in June 2024, as a guide for Ottawa’s waste management over the next 30 years. The information collected from the Waste Audit is meant to identify areas for improvement and trends within waste diversion and management efforts.
The Audit examines waste from four sectors:
- Single-Family residential: curbside garbage and organics
- Multi-residential properties: garbage and organics
- Yellow bag program for small business: garbage and organics
- Schools: organics
So what were the audit results?
Source: City of Ottawa, “Solid Waste Master Plan 2025 Annual Update,” (2025): 26.
In general, we’re not diverting enough—particularly organics. The Audit data indicates that from 37 percent (Yellow Bag Program) to 43 percent (single-family homes) of garbage sent to landfill are organics that should be in our green bin. We’re doing better with black bin and blue bin materials: only 6 to 8 percent (in each category) of what’s going to landfill constituted these materials.
Overall, 55% of what we’re sending to landfill—that is, more than half of what’s in our trash—could have been diverted.
Existing data also permits us to see how we’re doing through time: another Audit was conducted on our trash in 2018/19.
A comparison to the Waste Audit shows that through the intervening 5 years, we’ve barely improved. The earlier Audit showed that 58% of garbage sent to landfill could have been diverted through waste-sorting programs, and that 45% of the waste sent to landfill was green bin organic material, and 7 to 8 percent of trash could’ve been in the black bin, and 5 to 12 percent of trash in the blue bin.
And so we haven’t improved much with diverting organics, we’re about the same with black bin materials, and blue bin materials actually have gotten worse in single-family homes—although better in mutli-residential buildings.
|
Brown Bin (%) |
Green Bin (%) |
Black Bin (%) |
Blue Bin (%) |
|
|
Single-Family Curbside |
42% |
45% |
8% |
5% |
|
Multi-Residental |
42% |
39% |
7% |
12% |
Source: City of Ottawa, “Current State System Summary,” (2020): 31 - 33. Note that there’s no data for the Yellow Bag Program.
So no, that’s not very good—at all.
Why do high rates of organics in our garbage stream matter?
Source: City of Ottawa, “Climate Change Master Plan Progress Update and GHG Inventories” (2025): 43.
Decaying organics produce methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. In Ottawa, solid waste accounts for 11% of our total GHGs.
Moreover, decaying organics also are responsible for much of the odour that comes from landfills, which is bothersome to those living nearby—as those in West Barrhaven know.
What do we need to do?
The Solid Waste Master Plan emphasizes the need for increased education, promotion, behaviour change, and enhanced waste diversion methods by 2026 and 2027. But we need to do this faster. For example, we need to accelerate the roll-out of multi-residential home green bin programs. In the most recent Audit, 74 percent of waste from multi-residential homes was sent to landfill, 39 percent of which was green bin material. These numbers are the same as in the 2018/19 Audit. Another step is to require transparent bags for our trash. In peer jurisdictions, such as Markham, this improved diversion by 11 percent.
Furthermore, there are some community groups in Ottawa doing excellent work diverting waste:
- Ottawa Tool Library
- EcoEquitable
- Ottawa Outdoor Gear Library
- Helping with Furniture
The city could provide these organizations with operational funding to increase their capacity (as we’ve asked in the past).
Also, Budget 2026 is currently being discussed at Council. Now is a great time to ask your councillor for substantial investments in the Solid Waste Master Plan and the advancement of its 50 actions.
Unfortunately, Council missed a golden opportunity to meaningfully reduce what we send to landfill and incentivize diversion when it watered down a proposal by City staff to implement a “pay as you throw” program. Instead of this proposal, which was the product of extensive research and public consultation, Council voted for the 3-item limit, whose effect on changing behaviour is much diminished. But there will be future opportunities to revisit this decision and improve our diversion rates, and Council should seize them.
In summary, Ottawa must do better in waste diversion. We have too many organics in our trash that should be diverted to the green bin. Moreover, we haven’t improved much since the previous 2018/19 Audit—certainly not in ways that reflect the urgency of the climate crisis.
Let’s get composting, Ottawa!
