City hall sends mixed message on recycling

More than 24 years ago, The Starphoenix ran an article under the headline: “Garbage utility fee long way into future, works committee told.”

In that June 9, 1994 story, longtime councillor Owen Mann is quoted as saying: “I absolutely will not go for a utility. I know damn well taxes will not go down.”

Flash forward to the present and the future has arrived. City council’s environment, utilities and corporate services committee could take the first step today toward implementing user fees for trash collection.

With all deference to Mann and the many council members and residents who have harboured the same suspicion, city administration says property taxes overall will drop 3.5 per cent if utility fees are introduced.

The problem for many lies in the reality they will still be paying more, in large part because city hall also proposes to introduce a new citywide collection service for food and yard waste.

So residents will have to deal with another cart in their yards and both trash collection and food and yard waste pickup will only happen every two weeks.

Nothing about this plan suggests an easy sell for city hall, even though it is intended to prevent a pending environmental and financial disaster decades away.

Closing and replacing the city’s current landfill is estimated to cost $150 million to $175 million and those figures could be conservative.

Still, city hall officials and council members have known for decades about the monumental challenges posed by the wastefulness of the city’s residents and kicked the recyclable can down the road.

Saskatchewan’s two largest cities are undeniably landfill laggards. Saskatoon and Regina are the only cities of similar size or larger in Canada that do not deliver a program to collect yard waste.

Saskatoon’s waste diversion rate of 22.8 per cent in 2017 ranks near the bottom among similar Canadian cities, with only Regina below it.

As difficult as it seems to try to turn around such a dismal environmental record, city administration expresses confidence its preferred approach can result in achieving the 70 per cent diversion rate targeted for 2023.

Skeptics abound and the sales pitch will not be helped by another item that will be discussed at today’s committee meeting.

Saskatoon city hall is considering removing glass from the acceptable items for its residential recycling collection programs.

That’s right. At the same time the City of Saskatoon is introducing expensive new programs to try to extend the life of the landfill, it’s considering yanking another item from its recycling stream.

Some wondered from the beginning about including glass in recycling collection since it seems likely to wind up broken and unsuitable for recycling. It turns out, 90 per cent of it ends up shattered.

The city is proposing people drop off glass at SARCAN Recycling depots as an experiment, which seems likely to reveal that folks probably won’t make a special trip when dumping glass in the garbage is much easier.

If Saskatoon residents were inclined to make an extra effort to be less wasteful, the city’s environmental record would not be so abysmal.

The city already banned plastic bags from its recycling stream earlier this year.

These moves are mainly related to the international market for recyclable material. Low oil prices obliterated the market for recycled plastic bags since it was cheaper to make new ones, environment be damned.

A tighter overall market for recyclables is demanding higher quality material with less contamination. Glass only accounts for about four per cent of the material by weight collected through Saskatoon’s residential recycling programs, but its symbolic weight is likely much greater.

A city report says other municipalities have started stockpiling recyclable materials as a result of poor markets, but cities like Toronto, Calgary, Regina and Winnipeg still collect glass.

The City of Saskatoon cannot be held responsible for a lousy market for recyclable materials, but the timing is terrible. Residents faced with higher bills for garbage collection will probably be eager to abandon reason in favour of finger pointing.