The City of Morden is taking the next step toward diverting all waste from the landfill by 2020 by asking the food industry in the community to join the campaign.

Representatives from the City and local business owners of restaurants and grocery stores met in the Access Event Centre last week Thursday to discuss how composting could be made easier for businesses in the city.

"The Province sees that the ICI (industrial, commercial, institutional) sector has a huge amount of waste-to-landfill that can be diverted," said marketing and communications coordinator Chaley Martens.

"This is just the first step in helping to identify organics that can be diverted from the landfill."

One business owner, Ashley Funk from The Olive Tree in Morden, had been sending large amounts of compost to a local farmer for animal feed. Now that plan has halted and the compost bags are piling up.

"We don't have a system, so we're very thankful that this came about because this seems like a good solution," said Funk.

"I think it should be important to everyone," she added. "We should take care of our surroundings and our communities and keep everything as natural and clean as possible."

The short term goal for the City is to divert another 500 tonnes of waste away from the landfill in 2017. Last year alone over 800 tonnes, or 45%, of waste from the residential sector was composted rather than sitting in a landfill.

"If we add in what the business sector can contribute to that, I think that our goal of zero waste at 2020 can be totally achievable, we just need to buckle down and help each other to achieve them," said Martens.

Across the province there's been a lot of progress in this area. The amount of organics kept out of the landfill has nearly doubled in the past two years.

In 2016 the City of Morden partnered with Morden Co-op Food Store to start a pilot program to test how composting would affect a large local business. The results showed a 60 per cent reduction, 14,320 kilograms, in landfill waste