Organics service is available to single-family residential households within the city limits of Vancouver and Ridgefield. If you are unsure if you’re in the City of Vancouver limits, please reference the City of Vancouver Limits Map.  

Contact us to sign up for the organics program. A customer service representative will help you through the process.

First, you might save money! Separating out food scraps and yard debris from your garbage may help reduce the amount of garbage your household generates, therefore potentially reducing your garbage costs.

Second, you’ll be helping the environment. When food scraps and yard debris end up in the landfill, they decompose and produce methane (a greenhouse gas). However, when food scraps and yard debris are collected and sent to a compost facility, they become a valuable soil amendment that will return nutrients back to the environment.

No, you do not have to collect both food scraps and yard debris! You can choose to collect only food scraps, or only yard debris.

Some households might not have yards or gardens and won’t produce any yard debris. That is perfectly alright! You can still participate by collecting food scraps.

On the other hand, some households might not want to collect food scraps but want to collect yard debris. For these households, collecting yard debris only is certainly acceptable.

The yard debris and food scraps collected from homes will be collected and taken to West Vancouver Materials Recovery Facility where it is reloaded and trucked to Dirt Hugger, a commercial composting facility in Dallesport, WA. 

Keep a container in the kitchen to collect food scraps, then transport and empty this into your organics cart when ready. Please do NOT set out a kitchen food scraps container for curbside service.

You can keep this container on your kitchen counter or you can hide it away in a cabinet or under the sink. You might also consider placing the container in your refrigerator or freezer in order to cut down on smells.

There are many types of containers that are suitable for collecting food scraps in the kitchen. We suggest using a durable container with a lid to keep odors at bay. Here are some ideas:

• You can buy a kitchen compost container through many local stores or online.
• You can repurpose something you might already have, such as a large food storage container (think Tupperware).
• You can reuse any number of durable items, like large empty yogurt containers, hard plastic take-out containers, plastic coffee canisters, etc.

Whichever container you choose, make sure to empty and clean it regularly. You can use soap and water, or your favorite green cleaning method such as a 50:50 mixture of water and white vinegar.

Compostable bags are the only “compostable” or “biodegradable” products accepted in your organics. However, the industrial compost facility we send the organic material to prefers you to not use liners/bags at all. Compostable products don’t break down at the same rate as food or yard debris, causing problems for the compost facility to properly make compost. Also, no other types of bags are accepted, as the industrial compost facility cannot differentiate between compostable and non-compostable, so in every case they tear the bag open and throw it away. We recommend instead to use a reusable kitchen pail, throwing food waste/scraps in your organics cart frequently, and cleaning your pail out after every use.

Garbage disposals aren’t meant to handle large amounts of food. Sending food solids into the sewer puts added stress on the sewer system and those solids must then be removed later. Grease, fats, and oils are especially harmful and should be disposed as garbage. Give our sewer system a break and compost your food scraps instead!

Organics carts, like all other cart services, should not be overflowing. Please ensure that the lid of your cart remains closed.

For the safety of our drivers and the smooth operation of our equipment, we also enforce limits on the weight of carts. For 64-gallon carts the maximum weight is 130 pounds. For 90- or 96-gallon carts, the maximum weight is 200 pounds.