Sometime in the next two months, a new green “garbage” bin will appear in front of our homes.

Alongside will be a smaller green pail complete with a lid, for which we will have to find some space in our kitchens.

Starting in May, Saskatonians will be discarding a remarkable variety of organic wastes (not including hygiene products) into the pail and hence to the bin, which will be picked up by the city every two weeks -generally in alternation with our black bins.

In other words, Saskatoon is finally getting a Green Cart Program (for non-apartments; that will come later), which will divert up to 20,000 tonnes of garbage from our groaning landfill.

Why now?

“We’ve clarified a little bit better what we can and can’t do with compost,” said Brendan Lemke, the city’s director of water and waste operations. “We’ve just gained a little bit more momentum. You go around other cities and see green carts and that’s an indicator, in general, we’re more ready for doing something a little different than we used to.”

Another thing that’s been changing, he noted, having looked back at reports from 10 years ago, is that the cost of a new landfill has likely risen from $75 million to $120 million for the same project.

“There’s that sense of urgency of the cost going up on the alternative.”

Nothing changes with recycling, but garbage will be picked up on the every- two-week winter rotation all year, instead of weekly in the summer months. New garbage fees will roll out in 2024.

The city is trying to do green cart pickup on alternating weeks with garbage collection, but Lemke recommends checking your waste collection calendar to make sure.

“We’re really trying to promote the use of the Saskatoon Waste Wizard app. It will be up to date all the time and we’ll be using that as a digital means of “Like when we have a massive snowfall and you can’t put your stuff out, we give instructions through that.”

The Waste Wizard also has a search tool in it explaining which bin takes what kind of waste. The green bins hold 360 litres, the same size as the blue bins or big black bins.

All of this organic waste will be delivered to a composting plant operated by Green Prairie Environmental, which operates a landfill south of the city in Corman Park.

“When it came time for us to send out a request for bids on who could take our organic material and process it, they were the successful bidder on it,” Lemke said.

“The way they were going to handle it was to build a new facility.

“They are in the process of constructing a facility for this.”

Green Prairie will turn the waste into compost more quickly and at higher temperatures than home composting or depots. It will meet certifications for safe and healthy fertilizer for gardens and farms, Lemke noted.

The city expected to receive the carts from the supplier at the end of February and has booked two weeks to get them unpacked.

Lemke said they hope to deliver 2,000 of them a day to about 75,000 homes in March and April.

$10 million with 80 percent of that in the cost of the bins and getting them deployed.

Homeowners will be charged $6.73 per month for the service via utility bills, which will cover the entire cost — “to collect it, take to the processor, pay the processor for what they do… do maintenance on carts… and just to administer the overall program as well.

“We’ve had to create a whole backend billing system for this to make sure it can get on the utility bills.

“That’s based on our best guess of how much material we are going to get.”

The city is also planning “a pretty big and aggressive media campaign over the next month or two,” Lemke said.

“After I saw what was planned on that media campaign, I said, there’s no way any citizen of Saskatoon won’t know about this.

“It’s going to be everywhere.”

For more information about green carts, and to download the Saskatoon Waste Wizard app

visit saskatoonca/greencart

• Joanne Paulson