Blue bags are piling up in St. Albert as residents use recycling to get rid of their festive trash.
City collectors haven't seen much of a jump in the amount of trash they've collected since Christmas, says city operations supervisor Darrell Symbaluk, although the bags are certainly a bit heavier. "The biggest component is the recyclables," he says — some homes have been putting out as many as 25 blue bags at once. Staffers also saw hundreds of people lined up at the recycling depot after Boxing Day.
Lorenzo Donini, spokesperson for Ever Green Ecological Services, says his collectors haul about 47 per cent more material than usual during the week after Christmas, about 25 tonnes a day compared to 17 during the rest of the year. "The week back from Christmas is always mass wrapping paper and mass boxes," he says. They've got extra collector trucks on routes as a result and extra shifts at the sorting plant.
St. Albert residents have been pretty good when it comes to sorting their trash, Donini says, with relatively small amounts of unaccepted or contaminated material showing up in the blue bags. Some families are forgetting to collapse the big cardboard boxes their TVs come in, however, which makes life more difficult for collectors. "It's tough to force [those] down into the hopper area," he says, so he asked residents to mash their boxes flat before tossing them.
In with the new
Residents will see two big changes to waste collection this summer as the city switches to fully automated trucks and brings in curbside organic recycling. Those trucks will work with toters instead of bags and cans, and will drive to the Roseridge landfill near Morinville instead of the West Edmonton Landfill in Edmonton. The city is working on its contract for those toters, Symbaluk says, and should have them bought and shipped early this year.
Locals will also have year-round kitchen and yard waste recycling at the curb, a move which could keep up to 52 per cent of their trash out of the landfill, according to the 2009 Soneverra solid waste review. Organic waste is set to be picked up weekly from April to October and every other week during the rest of the year.
These changes won't come cheap — city council plunked down $3.7 million last June to bring in fully automated organics collection. The average two-bag-a-week household will now pay $25.49 a month, according to the 2011 budget, compared to $18.30 last year.
Public works staffers are gearing up for the change, Symbaluk says, which will see them collecting trash throughout the city instead of half of it as they do now. "It's an exciting time for us," he says. "We're moving closer to zero waste."
