"Daddy, Daddy! They're dropping off the recycling bins!"
Katrina was thrilled. She, Spencer and I ran out into the front yard in time to see the crew assemble our new large blue roll-out recycling bin. The kids ran back in the house, got the two overflowing Rubbermaid tubs with cardboard and newspaper, and we promptly dumped them into the bin. I even lifted Katrina into the bin to stomp down the cardboard. She was excited, to say the least.
Not half as excited as I was, however. I could hardly wait for this day to arrive, because I hate, despise, and generally loath recycling.
Don't get me wrong - I strongly believe in recycling most materials to the greatest extent possible, where the economics make a hint of sense. But to do that for the last several years meant keeping garbage in my house.
We don't really have room in the garage for it, and nowhere else was convenient, so a series of boxes or tubs would end up somewhere on our main floor, collecting what is essentially trash. When we got sick of looking at it, we had to stuff it into the truck and haul it downtown to the recycling depot. I'm sure other people had much neater solutions, but this was ours, and I hated it.
When the local waste collection firm, Regens Disposal, announced single-stream recycling was coming to Estevan, it was more than I could ever hope for. Finally I could get this trash out of my house.
In my many years covering municipal councils in Saskatoon, Rosetown and North Battleford, I discovered no one is ever happy with their garbage disposal solutions. It's a thankless business if there ever was one, and I feel sorry for the people who do the work. Not only is garbage and recycling collection messy and often smelly, the people who do it get treated poorly by the public as well.
In the Estevan Mercury, there has been a never-ending series of letters to the editor whining about the switch to front street pickup. In North Battleford, people hated the conversion to dumpsters from manual pickup. They wanted to see some guy with a soon-to-be-slipped disk hanging on the back of a truck for dear life, wind, rain, snow or heat, only to jump off, bend over and pick up their trash. Anything else was unsatisfactory.
I suspect the reason for this is people feel they can leave as much trash as they want when manual pickup is involved, but a container like a roll-out bin or dumpster has distinct volume limitations.
Well, folks, I have news for you. No one goes out with a sickle or scythe to harvest wheat anymore. When was the last time you saw a sheaf of wheat in the field? Why would anyone do literally back-breaking work anymore when we have this wonderful advancement called hydraulics? The waste contractor in North Battleford once told me that at the end of a career as a garbage man, you have a broken man.
If that means bigger trucks are required to do the pickup, trucks that don't easily fit under power lines and between fences in back alleys, so be it. Move the pickup to the front. It's really not that bad.
That Regens can handle this recycling in a single stream is even more impressive. Their business case works around economies of scale. They don't do the sorting locally, but rather bale it all and ship it off to larger centres for sorting.
In all the places I've lived over the years, this is the first time I have actually had curb side recycling. I'm sure many people will whine and complain about it, but this is a huge step forward. It's neat, simple, and I don't mind paying for it one bit. Hopefully more communities in Saskatchewan will follow suit.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
