Moving day a test for Ecocentres
Tenants must take it all when they go
With moving day looming on Tuesday, it’s one of the busiest times of the year for the city’s seven Ecocentres, which see a huge influx of unwanted-household items as thousands of Montrealers prepare to change addresses, Jesse Feith reports.
At the Rosemont — La PetitePrairie Ecocentre, pickup trucks loaded with unwanted household items and cars with materials tied to the roof line up in the entrance.
Ecocentre trucks can be seen coming in and out, bursting with loads of cardboard, glass, metal and all kinds of waste.
With moving day approaching, it’s one of the busiest times of the year for the city’s seven Ecocentres, which will operate on extended hours July 1.
“We see a real increase in questions about certain items around this time,” said Nikki Schiebel, who works for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce’s ÉcoQuartier and encourages the use of Ecocentres year-round.
When people live i n an apartment for a certain amount of time, they end up collecting a lot of items they’re not sure what to do with, such as light bulbs, paint cans and batteries, Schiebel explained.
Come moving day, it’s time to get rid of them, and many Montrealers bring them to their local Ecocentre, where waste is separated into different compartments for things like electronics, wood, toxic and flammable chemicals.
In 2013, the Ecocentres, which accept an array of items (refrigerators, upholstered furniture, renovation waste), were used by 258,000 visitors, totalling 860,500 tonnes of waste, said city spokesperson Jacques Lavallée.
But as anyone who has walked the city’s streets in early July knows, there’s a more common situation — departing tenants leaving bulky items or junk out on the curb.
“In general, over the July 1 period, waste management teams pick up about 60,000 metric tonnes of household dry waste, bulky objects and residential construction or renovation residue,” said city spokesperson Patricia Lowe.
And for Montrealers on the move July 1, there’s an even worse scenario — instead of junk piling up in the streets or making its way to Ecocentres, it’s simply left behind in apartments when tenants leave.
“When tenants move out, they’re expected to leave the apartment in the same exact condition as when they first moved in, empty and clean, and that is clearly written in both the lease and the law,” said Hans Brouillette of the Corporation des Propriétaires Immobiliers du Québec. “But often, that isn’t the case.”
Each year around moving day, one out of four new tenants moves into an apartment considered unclean, according to Brouillette.
Eleven per cent of the Montrealers who make the early July move will leave their old apartment in a bad enough state that the new tenant cannot move in, because of either major repairs that need to be done, or simply too much junk was left behind.
According to the Quebec Civil Code, belongings that are left inside an apartment must be kept by the respective landlords for 90 days, depending on what kind of items are left.
If a landlord considers something to be trash, he first needs to take a picture of it and have a witness agree it’s not worth keeping before getting rid of it, explained Martin Messier of l’Association des Propriétaires du Québec.
“If the landlord thinks it could be worth something to the previous tenant, it has to be kept in storage,” he said.
It’s up to the landlords — and often janitors — to empty the apartments before new tenants arrive, and to keep whatever is left over in storage for the roughly threemonth period after having alerted the previous tenant. It isn’t always the easiest thing to do.
“It can be difficult to find the tenants, as, contrary to other places, they have no obligation to give their new address to their former landlords,” Brouillette said.
In other provinces, he explained, landlords can ask for security deposits, so departing tenants have an incentive to give them their new addresses if they want to be reimbursed.
“But we don’t have that in Quebec,” said Brouillete, adding how landlords often have to resort to taking out an ad in local newspapers to alert past tenants.
“It’s a complicated situation that happens every year.”