The City of Montreal wants to reduce the amount of organic waste sent to landfills by 60 per cent in the next 10 years. (CBC)

In the next five years, 585,000 households and businesses in the greater Montreal area will stop sending their table scraps and grass clippings to landfills, city officials said Monday.

Federal, provincial and municipal governments came together to announce $559 million in organic-waste recycling projects for Montreal, Laval, Longueuil and communities on Montreal's south shore.

The money will be used for such things as new collection equipment and compost-recycling plants, including four on the Island of Montreal. Two of the plants will capture the methane gas produced from the waste and recycle it to fuel other services, such as public transit — a process known as biomethanisation.

Only about eight per cent of organic waste in Montreal is now recycled, said Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay. The goal is to boost that number to 60 per cent in the next 10 years.

While it may take time to change people habits, the new plan is the only responsible solution to the city's increasingly full landfills, Tremblay said.

"We have to convince each family, each member of a family to assume that responsibility," he said. "And it's also a collective responsibility, because our neighbours in the Montreal metropolitan community are saying 'Enough is enough. You cannot continue to export your garbage in our borough or in our city.'"

Environmentalists were pleased with the investment.

"They're good news from an environmental perspective because instead of throwing things in the waste site we will be producing energy," said Steven Guilbeault, spokesperson for the non-profit environmental group Equiterre. "We will be producing compost and we will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the order of half a million tonnes, which is significant

Similar plans were announced Jan. 28 for the Quebec City region.