The headline will inevitably be “The Cost of Garbage is Going Up”. The upcoming change at the City of Winnipeg, to come into effect on April 1st, has already elicited those headlines:
A New Model
What sparked these headlines is the decision by the City of Winnipeg to move the cost of waste and recycling away from the property tax to a utility model, with the cost being covered by user fees. As of April 1st, the City of Winnipeg is increasing the annual charge for garbage from $93 to $254. ($190 for 2025 in the CBC headline is a prorated amount for 9 months of 2025).
Realistically, and for all practical purposes, the cost of garbage is not going up, the city is only changing how we pay for it. By moving to a utility model, the real costs of waste management should become more transparent and self-sustaining. In principle, this is a good thing. Particularly for activities and services we need to see less of moving to a transparent utility model can be a good thing. That’s the principle behind things such are carbon taxes, and other “sin” taxes.
Waste Diversion
When it comes to garbage, Winnipeg needs to do a lot better. Sadly, we are lagging behind most other cities. The City just decided to move forward with a curbside organics pick up program. As I previously noted, this will be in place a full 40 years after Halifax started their organics program.
The result of waste diversion programs started in Winnipeg 20 years ago is mixed. Total waste has held generally steady between 260,000 & 280,000 tonnes per year. With the implementation of the blue cart, and then in 2013 of the curbside pick up of organics during the warmer months, the mix has been pretty consistent, with garbage being 70% of the waste stream, recycling making up 18% and yard waste being 12% of the total waste stream. When the blue bins, and then green bins were introduced, within a couple of years they reached the point where there was no further growth.
Full Cost Accounting
A benefit of the utility model is that it allows the “consumer” greater control of their costs. Moving waste and recycling from the tax base, where the cost of the service is buried within other costs, to a utility exposes the cost of the system. The true cost of waste and recycling was “subsidized” by property taxes: users of the system paid $93 and taxpayers paid the balance of $161.
Even at a yearly cost of $254 we are still not seeing the complete cost. Full cost accounting of waste and recycling needs to not only take into account the collection and disposal of garbage and recycling, which is what the $254 covers, but also all the other costs associated, such as the green house gas emissions of the landfill, the lost opportunity cost of sterilizing hundreds of acres of city land from future use (and future tax generation), the wear and tear on alleyways and roads, the future acquisition of land for a new landfill, among other costs. A true utility model would need to take into account all of those costs into the price modelling.
For residents, our full cost accounting needs to not only include the $254 garbage fee, but also the cost of the material we are throwing out, whether in the garbage or recycling, as well as the cost of bringing that waste into our homes in the first place. Let's not forget that we pay for that waste, whether we put it in the recycling or garbage, multiple times. The cost of the packaging (boxes, bags, styrofoam etc) is in the cost of the product we buy. We pay to have that packaging shipped to our home, whether we drive it home ourselves or have it delivered, and then we simply unpack the thing we want to keep and dispose of the rest. We pay for that box we put in recycling several times over, providing little to no benefit.
Waste Postponement
Waste diversion, which has been the focus of pretty much every city, needs to be considered as a short-term stopgap strategy. Yes, it is important to reduce garbage going to the landfill through recycling and composting, that is unquestionably better than simply burying it. But that still carries significant cost, and is fundamentally wasteful.
Recycling is not a waste diversion, it is at best a delay by a product generation or two of the inevitable end in a landfill. Recycled pop bottles become fleece jackets, that when worn out, end up in the landfill. Recycled paper is made into a lower quality paper, until it is waste. Metals are recycled into a lower quality metal, until there is no value left, then it is landfilled. Recycling, for all its benefits and focus, is an energy and resource intensive postponement of materials on their way to the landfill.
Mutual Benefits
It is mutually beneficial for the City and for residents to reduce waste in the first place. We each benefit from not bringing waste through the front door in the first place. Winnipeggers have indicated a willingness to reduce waste in the first place. While overall waste produced in Winnipeg has not significantly changed over the past 20 years, but on a per capita basis we have decreased our waste by 27%.
The utility model being implemented can be a tool for overall waste reduction. A fee for service model will give residents the ability to control their costs by reducing the amount of waste they produce (recycling or composting is still waste). A flat fee, regardless of how much service is used, is not allowing residents to control their costs.
As it stands, whether a household produces 5 kg of waste a week or 50 kg of waste, they pay the same amount. Whether they diligently separate and recycle or not, they pay the same as everyone else. If you compost or not, you pay the same. It is that way now, when waste and recycling is paid for by property taxes, and it will be that way next month, when it becomes a “utility”.
Putting in place a fee structure and mechanism where residents would pay based on use of the system would be more equitable, would allow residents greater control over their costs, and would incentivize the outcome the City wants, which is a reduction in waste.
There are many ways of achieving this, from different sized bins (with different fees), bag tags, or paying by weight. Each of these approaches would allow residents to choose and pay for the service that best suits them. The incentive is to reduce how much waste you produce.
Reducing waste, all forms of waste, benefits everyone. Recycling and “waste diversion” is the first step towards the goal of sustainability. Economic levers, such as full cost accounting, user pay systems, extended producer responsibility are all part of the complementary approaches needed to achieve that goal.
With the implementation of a utility model for waste and recycling, The City of Winnipeg has the opportunity to move us closer to the desired outcome.
Further Reading
The National Zero Waste Council does work on this topic. (I had the opportunity to sit on the Board of NZWC for a year). nzwc.ca/
Cradle to Cradle by Michael McDonough & Michael Braungart is a seminal book on this topic.
Brian
ps. There is one absolute head scratcher in report. Recommendation #8 is to look at having the ability to implement differential rates base on property value. This is called “Property tax” and is something that is explicitly being moved away from. It appears to be blatantly contradictory to the entire intent of moving to a utility model. I would also suspect that the amount of waste that a household produces is not related to how much their house is worth.
