Changes to recycling and waste collection in the province – at least in terms of who pays for what – is causing problems for property and business owners across the municipality.
If you own a home that has curbside garbage and recycling pickup, don’t try to take anything to a municipal transfer station unless you want to pay for it.
Recently, I went to deposit an old foam mattress topper into a trash bin at a local transfer station, along with some cardboard from our office. The staff told me that they could not accept the materials unless I paid for it. Eventually, seeing the limited amount of what I had in the truck, they let me dispose of it there, but said now that I was aware of the new rules, I’d have to pay if I came back.
Huda Oda, manager of waste for the municipality, said businesses aren’t supposed to take waste or recyclables to a transfer station.
“The environmental compliance approval from the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP) – they have specific rules on how we run them (transfer stations). It limits who we service,” she explained. “These are essential for residents who do not have curbside pickup, and they are not to service businesses.”
On the business end, as I mentioned in a previous column, people have been stealing garbage totes from businesses and residences in our area in recent months. We’ve lost two already this year, one of which was taken shortly after the Waste Connections Canada truck went by about 7 a.m.
People use the totes as cargo containers for food and beverages they are digging out of a dumpster from a nearby business.
So, with that in mind, I was considering just taking the garbage on a weekly basis to the Harwich Transfer Station.
However, as Oda mentioned, the transfer stations aren’t there for commercial businesses, according to provincial legislation.
In regard to commercial recycling, Oda said in a report to council last October that only a small percentage of commercial outlets took part in recycling when it was offered through the municipality. That led to the decision to cut off pickup from those locations.
However, there is now really very little encouragement for those participating companies to continue to recycle.
I contacted the municipality about recycling options for a business, and was told by a customer service representative to “just throw them out” if we couldn’t make arrangements for pickup.
Oda said, with the province stepping in to oversee recycling, it’s left a “gap for industrial, commercial and institutional (ICI) recycling collection.
It is up to those sectors to arrange for private pickup options.
Some businesses, especially ones operating on really tight margins, may very well send their recyclables to the landfill.
Oda said that could entail, at most, an estimated 152 metric tonnes of recycling not winding up where it should go.
She said Ridge Landfill takes more than 36,000 tonnes of garbage from Chatham-Kent each year.
Oda said the ICI recycling participants never included big box stores, so it’s not like these outlets would be sending massive amounts of cardboard to the landfill.
“Even before the transition, the big box stores would have had their own bins and their own contractors to pick up their cardboard,” she said.
The impacted business are…small business… the ones who use totes to take their recyclables to the curb for collection.
Oda said the municipality is asking the province to tweak its recycling collection model.
“What we’re doing in Chatham-Kent is we’re advocating fro the inclusion of non-eligible (ICI) sources, such as businesses,” she said. “The ministry (of Environment, conservation and Parks) is beginning to at least listen.”
In the meantime, some of us search for options, while others are just trashing their recycling. We don’t need any added pressure on our landfill sites, and surely don’t need any excuses for the provincial government to cut corners to establish new sites.
It is disgraceful that the municipality no longer picks up commercial recycling. What about all the businesses that produce so much in the form of plastic and paper; think of pharmacies and all the plastic containers that hold their stock of medications. It seems like a regression, to go back to throwing it all into landfill. How is that helping the planet??