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>>Compost Montreal takes out the trash

SEEKING ORGANIC GOLD: Stephen McLeod

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Look in your trash can. Besides cigarette butts, bottle caps and the other detritus of birthday, housewarming or dinner parties, odds are there is an awful lot of organic material—banana peels, coffee grounds, last week’s fettuccine and so on. Thanks to Montreal’s difficult-to-access composting regime, all of it will most likely end up in a landfill somewhere, rotting.

But Stephen McLeod sees gold in them thar garbage. Well, if not gold, maybe a few bucks, and a chance to feel good about making his corner of the world a little bit greener.

McLeod, a 30-year-old eco-conscious bike courier, started Compost Montreal last year with the idea that people might be willing to pay $5 a week to someone who would haul their compost away and clean out their bins, all to assuage their lingering green concerns. And he was right, if only on a small scale. Starting with maybe 20 clients in St-Henri last fall, he spent the winter concentrating on his run until this spring, when he and his truck-based service (which he hopes to someday convert to run on vegetable oil) expanded to NDG and the Plateau. He now services somewhere around 60 clients citywide, grabbing their compost out of hermetically sealed recycled containers placed on front porches, cleaning them out with biodegradable products and replacing the compostable corn-starch bag every week.

“It’s something that needs to be done,” he says. “I’ve always had this save-the-world… I dunno, mania, I’m always looking to do something meaningful. I used to be a technical writer, and I was being well paid, but it essentially meant nothing.” And while he hasn’t found a green pot of gold yet, he says he’s making enough money “to get my stuff paid.”

McLeod drops his compost collection at a West-End depot run by the city’s department of parks and horticulture, where it stews for a couple of years before being returned to the soil. The city uses its Ministry of the Environment-accredited compost for its parks projects, and sells some back to the public. But as a goodwill gesture, McLeod does give clients 16-gallon containers worth of compost each spring—“enough for a couple of corner flower beds,” he says.

But he is feeling somewhat stymied by bureaucratic apathy. “Aside from the department of parks and horticulture, the city doesn’t know we exist,” he says. “I want to work with the city and come up with things they don’t think of. But there are difficulties, because we’re playing catch-up.” He cites the plodding pace of Quebec’s reclaiming initiatives—our 1998 Action Plan for Waste Management envisioned that by 2008, 65 per cent of the province’s 7.1 million tonnes of residual matter would be reclaimed, which remains a distant fantasy—as a reason why the city of Montreal is lagging behind other major municipalities like Toronto (although he dislikes that city’s policy of allowing compost to be placed in non-biodegradable plastic bags, as well as the trucking of their hauls to Sorel-Tracy, boosting greenhouse gas emissions even as it tries to curb them).

“[Compost Montreal has] a community edge,” he says. “There’s a lot of door-to-door, which is very effective, but intensive. But it’s worked really well, and now that demand has grown, there’s more confidence in the service itself.”

Visit compostmontreal.com for more info.