No blue box to be left behind
New contractor and weather caused some boxes to be missed; special run Saturday
If your blue boxes weren’t picked up Thursday or Friday, leave them at the curb: recycling trucks are expected to do a special run on Saturday to pick up any boxes left behind.
The city’s new recycling contractor failed to pick up blue boxes along a dozen north-end streets on Thursday, but city waste diversion manager Dave Douglas doesn’t expect it to happen again.
“I would say these are very short-term growing pains,” Douglas said.
Emterra Environmental started a new contract doing both the pickup and processing of recyclables for the city on Nov. 1.
On Thursday, trucks missed roughly 12 streets in the northwest part of Peterborough. City waste diversion manager Dave Douglas said there were several factors at play.
Emterra has new drivers, new routes and new trucks, he said.
The firm has also been ordered by the city to inspect blue boxes and leave them behind — tagged with an adhesive note to the resident — when improperly sorted. That’s time-consuming enough, Douglas said — and then the city saw its first significant snowfall of the season on Thursday, delaying the pickup even further.
On Friday two recycling trucks were in the city’s north end picking up blue boxes left behind on Thursday, Douglas said.
Meanwhile there were also trucks on the usual Friday routes in East City.
It was still unclear late Friday afternoon whether all the city’s recycling had been entirely picked up for the week.
Douglas said that if the boxes were still left behind by Friday night, Emterra would be doing a special pickup on Saturday.
The city has asked Emterra to be more fastidious about improperly sorted boxes because buyers of recyclable materials increasingly demand purity, Douglas said — which means no stray cans mixed in with the paper, for example.
Peterborough uses a dual blue box system to keep newspapers separated from the empty containers: fibre in one box, containers in another.
An online tool called What
Goes Where? is available at peterborough.ca/recycling as guidance.
Emterra will be doing recycling pickup and processing for the next seven years in both the city and county.
Although the firm has a record of late garbage pickup in Niagara Region, Douglas doesn’t think there will be missed pickups in Peterborough on an ongoing basis.
He says it’s “common” for all recycling firms to have glitches at the beginning of a new contract.
The family-owned Emterra, based in Burlington, employs more than 1,100 people and operates across Canada and the U.S.