City will quadruple staff to snoop on your trash
The number of city snoopers peeking into residential waste bins to ensure the proper refuse is being deposited is set to quadruple this year as the city looks to get the biggest bang for its recycling buck.
A practice quietly performed by waste and recycling staffers since the inception of the city’s blue bin program in 2009, the receptacles have been spot-checked to ensure the proper material is in them before they enter the recycling stream.
But it’s not enough, say city bureaucrats, who want to significantly expand the bin peeping program.
Sharon Howland, leader of program management for waste and recycling, said crews have been performing checks on about 5,000 blue and green bins annually for the past number of years, but given an increasingly competitive market for the product, it’s more critical than ever that recyclables entering the stream are as pure as possible.
“With changes in the recycling market, we really have to make sure we’re providing the end market with recyclables that are high quality,” she said.
“We generally say most people do a really good job, but there is room for improvement.”
Under the long-running program, spot checkers sweep through neighbourhoods looking for easily noticeable examples of materials left in inappropriate bins. Violators will find their bins turned sideways so they’re not picked up that week by collection trucks. A notice is also left, informing the resident that unacceptable material had been identified within.
Howland said some 10 per cent of homes wind up on the receiving end of the bureaucratic finger wag, and the vast majority tend to comply immediately.
“We’re not digging through people’s garbage or anything like that, due to safety and privacy concerns,” she said. “We’re looking for egregious offenders.”
The city provides black (garbage), blue (recycling) and green (organics) bins to some 335,000 Calgary households. Homeowners shell out $8.80 per month for their recycling carts and $6.50 monthly for green carts, alongside the monthly payout of $6.85 for Bi-Weekly garbage pickup.
More contamination of incoming recyclables means a lower financial return, Howland said, and if it exceeds a certain threshold, the city can be levied a financial penalty from its contracted third-party recycler, Cascade Recovery Inc. — a provision she notes has “recently been occurring more often than not.”
To expand the existing educa- tion campaign aimed at bolstering compliance, the city has initiated a bidding process for a third-party outfit to take over the spot-checking program and perform residential recycling and compost audits on some 200,000 homes annually, co-ordinating with city staff to determine followup audits, timing and routes.
In addition, the successful bidder would potentially take on direct interactions with residents and collect data.
Howland wouldn’t discuss the city’s budget for the program, which calls for an initial one-year term with the potential to broaden it by as much as four years, but said it’s expected to pay for itself via savings created through a purer stream of recyclables.
However, Coun. Ward Sutherland, chair of the city’s utilities committee, said he’s not sure expanding the bin peeping program is the best way to educate users on the importance of keeping contaminants out of the recycling stream.
Instead, he would prefer to see the city up its game on directly advising residents with large stickers permanently affixed to the tri-colour bin system, outlining the proper refuse allowed in each receptacle in picture format to dodge potential language barriers.
“It’s more about educating the user that the better you recycle, the better your return,” Sutherland said.
“I think we should be doing stickers. It’s something we could easily do when the life cycle of the current bins runs out.”
The veteran councillor said he’s also hopeful the city will recoup some of its costs through an initiative championed by Coun. Peter Demong, who wants the city to press the province to pursue producers of recyclable products to cover costs for their entire life cycle.
The bidding process for the expanded city program is expected to end Feb. 25, and Howland said the hope is to launch the expanded program by early summer.