Pat yourselves on the back, people of Chatham-Kent. Rick Kucera, the municipality’s manager of waste and recycling services, said residents have done such a good job diverting lead and yard waste in the Chatham area that the municipality will have to expand its depot to keep up.
“What we’re finding is that during peak season – spring and fall – it’s just wild over there,” he said of the number of people who use the Chatham Leaf and Yard Depot on Creek Road, especially on Saturdays. “It’s to a point where we didn’t have any choice.”
Kucera said residents show they have a passion to utilize the leaf and yard depot.
“There’s a commitment by the community to divert their waste. The volumes have been steady the last couple of years,” he said. “The number of vehicles is astounding on a Saturday.”
In 2015, more than 30,000 vehicles came through the depot to dump leaves, branches and other yard waste. Nearly 28,000 vehicles visited the Depot in 2016 –an average of more than 100 vehicles per operating day.
During the peak fall season the site has received as many as 575 vehicles over eight hours on one Saturday.
As a result, Kucera said the municipality expanded the depot by a third.
“It’s going like gangbusters with all the grass being cut and with the nicer weather,” he said, adding this follows a 2013 expansion at the depot. “It was needed then and we needed to do another now. It’s a pretty inexpensive fit for all the right reasons.”
Those reasons, he said are led by the diversion of waste from the landfill, as it is much less expensive for the municipality to handle it at the depot than to pay to have it stashed at the landfill site.
Kucera said the depot isn’t seeing all of the local efforts from the public either, as more and more people are “grass recycling – mulching it and leaving it on their yard. It’s all good for the environment and all helps hold our costs in check.”
Plus, the leaf and yard waste is turned into mulch by the municipality and then set aside for residents to use as they see fit.
“We give it back for free to those who need it in their yards,” Kucera said.
There is so much mulch created from the depot that residents aren’t making use of it all, so the municipality has community partners – such as Kerr Farms and Sloan’s Tree Nursery – who use it as well.
“Everybody seems to be interested in it,” he said.
The Chatham Leaf and Yard Depot is one of nine operated by the municipality.
