More Montrealers are composting than ever, but your mileage may vary wildly depending on where in the city you live. That's the takeaway from an analysis in the Journal Metro.
Metro obtained the figures chronicling Montreal's use of the compost program, as well as the disparities in its use from borough to borough, via the Access to Information Act.
In total, 26% more table scraps were collected in Montreal's brown-bins in 2018 than in 2017. That's 36,000 tonnes of compostable material every month.
The two boroughs that do the best job at composting are, perhaps unsurprisingly, two of the boroughs that have been composting the longest. Outremont and Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce each compost over 80kg of waste per person per year (the exact figure is 87 and 84 kgs, respectively). By contrast, LaSalle (51kg) and le Sud-Ouest (49kg) did not perform quite as well.
While those figures seem impressive, Montrealers actually compost much less than Canadians in other major cities. The average Torontonian composts 166kg of waste.
The city says that by the end of the year, almost every multi-dwelling building should have a curbside "brown bin" for composting. Single-family homes will have to wait as many as several more years, until larger-scale composting infrastructure can be constructed. The city has not yet laid out a timetable for that.