Or is it? Talking frogs aside, it all depends on who you ask. If you ask Buffalo, with its shabby recycling rate—6.5 percent at latest count—compared to the national average of 32 percent, being green is tough. The highest recycling rate ever achieved here was 14 percent in the mid 1990s, but that number’s been steadily sliding ever since, prompting city officials to seek recycling incentives. The upshot of that are the current talks with Recyclebank, a Pennsylvania-based company whose program credits recyclers with cash that can be used to redeem discount coupons for stores like IKEA and Starbucks. The city has the power to impose fines on residents who don’t recycle, a system that has worked well in the Village of Hamburg, but it has never done so. Instead, Buffalo has struggled in vain to engrain environmental awareness and the positive economics of recycling on its residents. According to the city’s Web site, “increasing our recycling rate by a mere 1 percent will bring an additional $72,000 into the city coffers.”

Instead of looking south to Pennsylvania, our city officials might do better by looking to Toronto, who’s found in recent years that being green only gets easier the more green you get. Toronto’s latest success is the green bin program. Started in 2001 and phased in over four years, the green bin program allows citizens to recycle all of their organic waste. The list of green bin recyclables includes all food scraps, ranging from veggies to grains to meats, as well as animal waste and bedding, pet food, soiled paper products and even dirty diapers. It is, by all measures, a comprehensive municipal composting program. Each household receives a small green bin to keep in the house and a larger tote for weekly curbside pickup (as opposed to recycle and garbage, or “residual waste,” which are collected bi-weekly). The program has been a huge success in its first few years. More than 500,000 private residences are enrolled in the program (with 90 percent actively participating) and 1,500 businesses, diverting over 100,000 metric tons of organic waste from landfills each year.

That material is instead trucked to organic waste processing facilities, where it is turned into compost and biogas. Brian Van Opstal, Acting Manager of Operational Planning for Toronto’s Solid Waste Management Services, explained where it all goes. “We have our own processing facility here in the city, which does about a quarter of it. There is another facility in Newmarket, which is just about 45 minutes north of the City of Toronto, and that processes about 10 to 15 percent of the material, and right now the rest of it is processed at composting facilities in Quebec.” He said, however, that Toronto has recently approved the construction of two new processing plants in the city, which will handle up to 110,000 metric tons of organic material each year, starting in 2010. This will allow the city to bring its other 500,000 housing units—the ones that are in apartment buildings and condominiums—into the program. Those plants will also produce biogas, a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide, which will be combusted to produce electricity that will be sold into the grid by the city.

The main driver behind the green bin program was a planning group that formed in the late 1990s, Taskforce 2010. Made up of city staff, councillors and members of the public, the group was charged with diverting the majority of the city’s waste from landfills over the next 10 years. The green bin program was one of its primary recommendations. Admittedly, the program is more expensive that simply tossing organic waste. According to Van Opstal, “There’s no doubt that it’s significantly more expensive to manage the organic materials in this way than it would be to just leave them in the waste that gets hauled and landfilled.” Toronto pays between C$120 and C$140 per ton to process its organic materials, versus C$70 and C$80 to landfill each ton (all of that is dumped in Michigan, by the way). But they’re still managing to do it at a per-household cost that is similar to Buffalo’s system.

This summer, Toronto’s city council passed a measure to move funding for solid waste management off of the property tax and onto a service-based fee, much like in Buffalo. The budget for Solid Waste Management will come from a user fee, paid yearly by every household. With a relatively fixed funding stream dedicated to managing it waste, Toronto believes it will be able to boost its recycling from its current rate of 42 percent up to 70 percent by 2010. The new system stacks up pretty evenly against Buffalo’s, too. The Toronto pricing system works like this: Each household is given the option of a 75-liter (~4 gallons) garbage bin, which costs a standard $62 per year. If they want a bigger tote, they pay extra: $41 more for 120-liter (~32 gallons), $101 more for 240-liter (~63 gallons) and $151 more for 360-litre (~95 gallons). Compare that to Buffalo’s tote prices: $145.36 for 35 gallons, $162.80 for 65 gallons and $170.24 for 95 gallons. It’s slightly cheaper in Buffalo, but think of the resulting environmental boon for the city if we could recycle our organic wastes, which make up about 12 percent of the total waste stream, according to federal statistics.

Garry Carrel, Erie County’s Recycling Coordinator, points out that Erie County is very much involved in composting, though not primarily on a municipal level. The county has an annual sale of discounted composters and partners with the Buffalo Museum of Science to sell the Garden Gourmet composter at a reduced price of $49. But until there’s a processor locally who can handle organics more comprehensively, Carrel doubts we’ll see any changes here. “I think that once everyone sees the benefits of yard composting, there could be a move in that direction,” he says. That, or some new laws. “I do think that there has to be some encouragement from a legislative level to push municipalities to enact (organics composting).” Until that happens, Kermit is spot on for WNY.

If, in your travels, you’ve encountered other good ideas for Buffalo, we’d like to hear about ’em. Call us at 881-6604 or send email to peter@artvoice.com. We appreciate it, and we’re sure the city will someday, too.