The sight of thousands of maggots under his green biodegradable bin has left a St. Albert senior with serious concerns about the city’s waste disposal composting program.
“If this is part of Mayor Crouse’s great plan to beautify the city, I don’t appreciate it. They need to rethink this,” said Jay Bunker.
Bunker found the squirming mass by his driveway Saturday after he went to move the bin from his back door.
“All the little critters were on the driveway. There must have been a thousand of them,” he said.
Maggots are the larval stage of flies and can be found in all garbage, especially refuse containing meat.
“The garbage is collected with the same frequency as it always has been; it’s just that you didn’t necessarily see the maggots when they were hidden inside plastic bags,” said Christian Benson, waste management director for the City of St. Albert.
Bunker worried that the maggots could pose a health problem.
“I have grandchildren. What if a dog eats them? Flies carry disease,” he said, adding that he hoped the birds would eat the things, but that didn’t happen.
“I hoped the birds would eat them, but after I hosed them down, they just stayed in the cracks between the slabs of concrete and they were still alive,” Bunker said, adding that he sprayed his garbage bin with pesticide.
Peter Heule, life sciences outreach technician at the Royal Alberta Museum, also had some concerns about the health safety of maggots in the vicinity, and suggested the best thing to do would be to move the garbage containers away from the house.
“Blue bottle flies rear up on rotting flesh and there is a risk of contamination and the spreading of disease. Whenever you have meat rotting, there will be flies and therefore maggots,” Heule said.
Heule argued against using pesticide on any bugs found within the composters.
“Keep in mind that spraying with pesticide will only deal with the insects in the bin at the time. Many more may show up after you’ve sprayed, and isn’t poisoning all that rich organic matter missing the whole point of composting in the first place?”
Heule went on to explain that flies and indeed maggots play a vital part in the decomposition of all matter, but before laying their eggs, the flies could also have touched all matter of potentially disease-ridden unpleasant things from dog feces to rotting meat.
“You don’t want to share the menu with them, but be glad there is some creature out there that does eat these things or we would be knee-deep in decomposing matter,” Heule said, stressing that creatures that feed on rotting food, even dead animals, are essential to our lives.
Warm temperatures last week would have speeded up the decomposition of Bunker’s garbage, and the flies were able to take advantage of the opportunity and exploited it as quickly as possible to lay their eggs then leave their young on all that juicy hot composting garbage.
Benson, who studied the waste disposal system at Strathcona County and practiced a similar program himself for about three years, has advice for homeowners wishing to make the maggot problem less visible.
“Put your compost bin out of the sun, just as you would with any garbage. Use compostable bags or wrap the scraps, especially meat scraps, in newspaper. I keep meat scraps in the fridge until garbage pickup day,” he said.
Other suggestions include putting linseed oil, which is biodegradable, on the lid as a repellent. If you spot maggots in your compost bin, pour boiling water on them.
“That usually gets rid of them and rid of the flies too,” said Benson.
