Region of Waterloo celebrates Compost Awareness Week with free soil and a peek behind the bins

The Region of Waterloo celebrates Compost Awareness Week with free compost and waste management plant tours. CTV's Hannah Schmidt tells us more.

To celebrate International Compost Awareness Week, the Region of Waterloo is getting down and dirty — literally — by offering residents free compost made from their own organic waste and opening the doors to its waste management plant.

“This is a recycling diversion program to take leaf and yard waste out of the landfill,” said Tom Alkema, operations supervisor at the Region of Waterloo. “We receive leaves in yard waste through the curbside collection, that material gets ground up and it gets turned in our composting operation and it turns into this beautiful compost here.”

Residents showed up this week with buckets, bins and even trailers to collect nutrient-rich compost produced from the region’s spring yard waste program. The giveaway aims to highlight the environmental benefits of composting and encourage more residents to participate.

“We’ve been noticing we compost a lot in our backyard and it really lessens the amount of trash that goes to the curb every day,” said Hannah Lemont, a user of the program. “We are hoping to grow a lot of food this year, and so, my husband’s building us some garden boxes and this is the most economical way to fill them.”

At the Cambridge Transfer Station located at 201 Savage Dr., two large piles of soil were made easily accessible for people to just drive up and dump in their bins.

“Annually, we generate around 40,000 metric tons of leaf and yard waste and brush” explained Alkema. “And we screen annually around 33,000 cubic metres of compost. Usually, we give around 1,500 cubic metres of compost back to the residents.”

According to officials, there is a cap on how much material people can take at a given time.

“Just because we have various interests, some people want to take extremely large amounts of material,” said Alkema. “We want to make sure that there’s enough compost available for everyone. So, we do limit to five bushels per household. That way, all the residents within the region get the opportunity to participate in the program.”

This year, the region launched its first-ever Waste Discovery Day — a public event designed to pull back the curtain on where household waste actually goes.

“We have invited members of the public to come to our site and learn all about things garbage related,” said Deanna Dakin, supervisor with the Region of Waterloo waste management division. “We’re looking for input from the residents on the future of waste.”

During guided tours in buses at the Waterloo Waste Management Centre, attendees got to see where exactly their garbage, green bin and yard waste go after it leaves their curb.

“It is an engineered landfill site so they get a behind the scenes look at what’s happening on our site today,” said Dakin.

Tours snaked through the facility, where residents learned what happens to everything they toss, from plastics to peels and even old toilets.

“The fact that they make the roads out of toilets, that was pretty interesting,” said one attendee.

It was an educational journey and a reminder that waste isn’t wasted if it’s handled right.

“We’re still seeing 35 to 40 per cent of food waste in our garbage and what we really want is to capture that material in our green bins,” said Dakin. “That material is turned into a healthy soil amendment that you can add to agricultural fields or to act as a nutrient for the food cycle.”

Dakin said the centre is currently in the process of launching a new cart-based collection service for residents starting in March 2026.

“We are rolling out black garbage carts and green food waste carts that will be delivered free of charge to households in Waterloo Region,” she said. “So, that’s a focus for our team for the next year to get out to events, to educate our residents, to make sure they’re aware of this change.”