North Battleford officials are sounding the alarm about the amount of contamination found in recycling carts in the city.
The issue came up at last week’s city council meeting. Administration noted that Loraas Environmental Services Ltd. is reporting an increase to the amount of non-recyclable materials found in the blue carts.
“They’re discovering more and more garbage is being thrown in,” reported director of utilities Stewart Schafer at council.
An inspection was done of recycle carts in July, conducted by Loraas employees and members of city administration. A total of 22 carts were tagged over two blocks.
Of those, plastic bags and/or stretchable plastics were found in 14 of them.
Six carts included unrinsed containers, four included paper towers/Kleenex/wrapping paper, and a smaller number of carts included various other items such as compost, mixed product, fabric/clothing, window screen or other garbage.
“This is starting to increase the costs of recycling, because someone has to go in there and pull the material out,” said Schafer of the issue.
Pictures were circulated at council of items found in the bins, such as wax paper from an ice cream cone that actually belongs in the garbage and not the blue bins.
One reason cited for the high amount of plastic found could be because they were only recently prohibited. Earlier this year, Loraas announced they would no longer be accepting plastic for recycling because their primary market, China, was refusing to accept it any longer.
“Sometimes, it’s just residents not knowing,” said Bater of the issue. He noted he had received a call from someone whose blue bin hadn’t been collected because there was stretchable plastic in it.
Going forward, Schafer said the intention was to address the issue in some way. It could be more education, he said, but he also suggested fines could be brought in.
Schafer said a policy would be brought to council in the future to discourage the activity.
