Glass collection containers coming to Sherbrooke
Sherbrooke mayor Steve Lussier and representatives from organizations affiliated with the city’s glass collection project gathered at the Centre Julien Ducharme on Friday morning to unveil glass only collection containers now available to the public.
The city’s current plan is to provide the containers in seven different districts. As soon as July 15, more containers will be opened in spaces including the Brompton and Rock Forest–saint-élie–deauville borough offices, the Jacques-cartier and Jules-richard parks, as well as the Richard-gingras community centre and Yvan-dugré arena.
According to Karine Godbout, the president of Sherbrooke’s environmental committee, the goal of the program is to eventually provide glass collection in all 14 of Sherbrooke’s districts.
Godbout credits the collection services in St. Denis de Brompton as a source of inspiration for the project. In 2015, the municipality installed their own glass collection container in an effort to make their recycling more effective.
Broken glass mixed in with paper and cardboard creates a huge problem for recyclers, explained Réal Vigneau, spokesman for the Sherbrooke glass committee. According to Vigneau, approximately 50 per cent of recycling in sherbrooke ends up in landfills because of contamination by broken glass.
Sharp shards of broken glass present a safety hazard to workers sorting the recycling, and when it ends up mixed in with paper and cardboard it becomes very difficult to separate. This leads to thousands of tonnes of material that could be recycled to be dumped annually.
The glass committee was a major spearhead in the project, helping to push it forward with a petition that garnered 6,000 signatures. Vigneau was excited to see a project like this finally realized “at the scale of a large city.”
Another major proponent was the Marché de Solidarité, a sherbrooke grocery selling local produce, who offered glass collection for a period in 2018 and successfully demonstrated the demand for separate glass recycling in Sherbrooke.
Sherbrooke first implemented glass collection at some grocery stores in 2019 but switched the program to public spaces after the outbreak of COVID-19 to ease the strain from grocers struggling to meet government regulations for social distancing. This public spaces “Plan B” is how the city plans to move forward with the program in a POST-COVID world.
Over 200 annual tonnes of glass is deposited each year in St. Denis de Brompton.
Godbout has high hopes for the Sherbrooke project, expecting to be able to collect that same amount monthly.
Citizens are encouraged to come and drop off any recyclable glass in the black bins rather than their home recycling. Be sure to remove any metal or plastic covers before dropping them through the holes in the top of the containers, and avoid depositing any items that aren’t completely made of glass, like light bulbs, as well as pyrex containers.