Garbage and Recycling

At its meeting of June 5, 2024, County Council reviewed a range of funding models for taxpaying residents of the County’s seven municipalities, and ultimately endorsed a hybrid model, which combines the County levy-based funding model with a user-fee methodology to cover new expenses associated with the Green Bin program.

County Council approved a hybrid user-fee approach to recover costs from only those County residents who have access to the Green Bin Program. For 2025, that includes Essex, Lakeshore, LaSalle and Tecumseh. Amherstburg, Kingsville and Leamington come on board in the fall of 2026. Council approved this approach as it did not want to charge residents for a service that some could not access.

Under this hybrid user-fee approach, each municipality’s tonnage/use of the Green Bin program is used to calculate a unique user fee, on a “per-residential-property” basis for that municipality. The user fee will then appear on the property tax bill for each residential property with access to the service. Estimated annual fees for each municipality were provided in a Dec. 17, 2025, report to County Council. The estimated cost of the green bin program was also communicated publicly in July 2024 by EWSWA to all media outlets in the region. The estimate communicated in 2024 was $2 to $3 per household per week.

Councils of both the County of Essex and City of Windsor approved a regional program that supported residential homes and multi-residential buildings under six units having access to the Green Bin program. This is also how the Blue Box program was administered. So, even if a resident chooses to put food waste in the garbage and not the green bin, they still have access to the organics program and still pay for the service. Additionally, many contracts for the Green Bin program now run well into the 2030s. So, the program is here to stay and will have tremendous environmental and economic benefits, including extending the life of the Essex-Windsor Regional Landfill.

The decision to move to a regional food and organic waste collection system was made by a previous Council on March 16, 2022. Since then, there have been multiple council meetings, reports and media stories on this issue. The Essex-Windsor Solid Waste Authority has launched an extensive marketing campaign about the Green Bin program. In December, County Council received a report from County administration identifying the upcoming rollout of an awareness campaign by the County, in collaboration with local municipal tax departments. Residents will receive information in their final tax bill mailing.

There are costs to this new program, yes, but it is important to focus on the benefits of putting food waste and organics in the Green Bin. Instead of sending the material to the landfill and using valuable airspace, it is diverted to an anaerobic digester, where the material breaks down and is used to create renewable energy and fertilizer for farmers’ crops. This process is also different than incineration, which simply burns waste to generate heat.

Only 13 weeks into the Green Bin launch, EWSWA estimates that 3,000 metric tonnes, or the equivalent of 60 NHL hockey arenas worth, have already been diverted from the Landfill. And that amount – and those savings – are only going to increase as more municipalities come on board, and as more residents embrace the program.

We should all care about extending the life of the Landfill because we will all have to pay a lot of money for a new one. The cost to site a new Landfill is estimated at more than $700 million. It is far less expensive, for all of us, to embrace this Green Bin program now instead of paying the exceptionally high costs of siting a new one.

Knowing the province was going to be transferring the program to producers, EWSWA has been subsidizing the actual net cost of the recycling program for residents by using reserve funds. There are no savings in the EWSWA budget as a result of transferring the recycling program to producers.

If you reside in Essex, Lakeshore, LaSalle, or Tecumseh, in a single-family residence or in a multi-residential property with 6 units or less, and if your residence receives curbside garbage and recycling collection, you are eligible to participate in the Green Bin program and should have received a Green Bin.

For residents of Amherstburg, Kingsville, and Leamington, Green Bin deliveries will begin in the fall of 2026, shortly before the Green Bin program commences in those municipalities.

If you do not have a Green Bin and believe you should have one, or if there is an issue with your current Green Bin, you can contact EWSWA via its website (www.ewswa.org) or phone 1-800-563-3377.

If you have any questions about billing for the organics program, please email coeinfo@countyofessex.ca.

If you have any questions about the Green Bin program, please contact EWSWA via its website (www.ewswa.org) or phone 1-800-563-3377.