Garden Supplies | Compost Company Can’t Find A Home
The compost may have hit the proverbial fan for one local company that has one week left to relocate piles and piles of organic waste.
Manitoba Conservation officials told Samborski Garden Supplies to wind down its composting operations and move all of the compost material off their McGillivray Boulevard property by Sept. 1. The landscape company, which also picks up food and yard waste from Winnipeg grocers, hotels, schools, homes and businesses, composts an estimated 100 tonnes of organic waste every week that would otherwise contribute to harmful gases and contaminants if sent to a landfill.
Provincial and city officials say the business has prompted hundreds of odour complaints from nearby Whyte Ridge residents. Conservation officials can’t give the company an environmental licence because the property is not zoned for such a large compost operation.
Lenn Samborski, who runs the 90-year-old family business alongside relatives, said he knows the current site is not ideal for a large composting operation, but the company has nowhere else to go. He denies his compost operation smells and said the odour comes from the Brady Road landfill where the city dumps bio-solids.
Samborski said he tried to relocate to a plot of land just west of the landfill, but the RM of Macdonald twice denied his application. Macdonald Reeve Rodney Burns said officials decided the compost smell could cause problems for nearby residents of Waverley West and that “it wasn’t an appropriate place” for a compost facility.
Samborski said he was in talks with the city to relocate the composting business to the Brady Road landfill earlier this year, but his lawyers told him not to sign the draft lease agreement because of the cost and the terms. Samborski said he’s frustrated because his business provides a valuable service and claims government officials are in effect trying to shut down the “only game in town.”
Unlike other cities, Winnipeg does not have municipal food and yard waste collection.
“I could probably propose a nuclear plant at Portage and Main and have better co-operation and get it up faster than a composting facility,” Samborski said. “(Elsewhere) in
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