Cars idling in line at waste depot

Recently, I drove to one of the City of Ottawa's hazardous waste depots held periodically through the year. This one was at the Barrhaven snow dump, many kilometres from my Westboro residence.

To their credit, those who organized and ran this event did a superb job, given the hundreds of cars bearing a variety of household hazardous waste ranging from toxic and flammable liquids to propane tanks and fluorescent lighting tubes. Traffic flow was well managed. One also has to give credit to the many Ottawa residents who took the time to dispose of this waste.

There is, however, a serious flaw — no fault of those who operate or participate in it. It defies logic that so many vehicles need to line up and idle their engines for nearly an hour to accomplish this important task.

The city has announced its new climate change master plan with great fanfare. One relatively easy way to reduce greenhouse gases would be to eliminate these drive-in depots or at least diminish their impact.

There are obvious solutions: The simplest would be to encourage residents of a given neighbourhood to designate only a few drivers to collect and transport this waste to the depots. This would require co-ordination, of course, kind of like carpooling. The city would need to publicize this accordingly.

More effective would be to discourage public drive-in collection altogether. Why doesn't the city designate a few days a year for hazardous waste pickups using larger vehicles operated by the city or contractors? Specialized recycling trucks would not be necessary. There could even be an online or phone appointment system set up to notify truck or van crews to drop by and haul this stuff away as opposed to a general house-by-house pickup. If charities can organize pickups for used items, the city should be able to do something similar for hazardous waste in various neighbourhoods.

Wesley Dearham, Ottawa