City of Powell River’s solid waste practices and strategies were outlined during a recent presentation to the city’s committee of the whole.
Rod Fraser, manager of operational services, provided a solid waste and recycling update to the committee at its September 29 meeting.
Fraser said the city is working toward a few initiatives to support waste reduction in the community.
He said he wanted to outline paperless scheduling for 2021. Fraser said in past, the city’s garbage and recycling schedule used to go out in printed versions to every home in the city. Close to 6,000 were printed on an annual basis.
“For 2021 we’re hoping to go digital,” said Fraser. “We wouldn’t print that many but we’d still have some available for people who really want them, but the bulk would be paperless for 2021.”
People who are using the paperless system can still print schedules from the website.
Fraser said the city also has an electronic reminder system for solid waste. He said users receive a text message, a voice mail, tweet or phone alert the night before garbage pickup and the message also indicates whether recycling will be the next day or not, given that recycling is picked up every two weeks. About 1,400 local households subscribe to the service.
He said the system is also useful if there is a change in schedule. Recently, a garbage truck was not operational and the city was able to communicate with the route that day regarding the change in service.
Fraser said a database is starting up on the city’s website called the waste wise wizard. Users can type in items they are looking to recycle. Examples would include items such as wine corks, DVD/CD cases, licence plates or appliances.
“You can punch those in and it will tell you where you can get those recycled,” said Fraser.
The city also places ads in the Peak with the next month’s schedule and any important information or updates that residents need to know.
Another activity is the resident survey through the city’s participatepr.ca website, designed for residents to voice how they would like to see the future of the community’s curbside collection. Fraser said the city had received solid participation.
“People really want to recycle is the sense I get,” said Fraser. “We’ve had around 515 responses to date. We are going to encapsulate the survey data when we come back to council in October, so you can look forward to that.”
Fraser said the survey asks about collection frequency. The majority of people responding so far have indicated they would like to see weekly recycling collection. In a week, the amount of material the majority residents would recycle was a black garbage bag size of recyclable materials.
Fraser outlined a composting program within the city’s buildings and a fishing line recycling pilot project. He then highlighted automated collection and said there are plans to come before council and talk about the matter.
“My understanding of the history is in 2017 the city purchased trucks with the automated arms,” said Fraser. “From there, we added on a compost program, so we have approximately 400 homes on this program. It’s a super popular pilot program and we have a lineup of people wanting to get into the program.
“We are limited with what we can do, however, with expansion.”
Fraser said removing compostables from the garbage stream would reduce about 40 per cent of the solid waste content in a city-wide program. The inhibitor is there is not a depot in Powell River to process the compost. Currently, compost from the pilot project is transported to Sechelt, which is not sustainable for a bigger program.
In terms of composting, Fraser said qathet Regional District has a request for proposals for a local composting facility. He said the city is thinking of moving to automated waste pickup, where households would have bins that could be used with the automated trucks.
In terms of garbage tags, Fraser said he has been hearing that residents would like to move away from tags. He said the easiest way to accomplish that would be to take the tags and the revenue and add it into the solid waste tax levy.
“The thought process is if we moved to an automated system, we would hopefully do away with the tags and put all of the cost into a levy,” said Fraser.
Councillor George Doubt said it would be a simpler system to eliminate the tags and find a different way of funding the system. He said he’d rather see the tags go away.
Fraser said he would be coming back to council to seek its input and consideration in moving toward an automated model, where trucks use an automated arm to pick up containers specifically designed for this type of operation.
“We would look at an automated model for waste and look at the other two streams,” said Fraser.
That would include recycling and composting.
