Waste Management

[Acitta]

Waterloo region set to make pricey changes to waste management
High costs attributed to new industry standards, waste management director says
Changes in the new contract include a switch to carts from bins, greener trucks and a four-day collection week.

[the_conestoga_guy]

I wonder how this will effect the enforcement of bag limits. These 240L bins are fairly large, so people may end up throwing more in the trash if they think they're allowed to fill them. Plus, the bag limits won't be enforced if the operator is just someone pressing a button in the cab of the truck. Hopefully this extra volume doesn't end up reducing the life span of our dump.

[Acitta]

I wonder how this will effect the enforcement of bag limits. These 240L bins are fairly large, so people may end up throwing more in the trash if they think they're allowed to fill them. Plus, the bag limits won't be enforced if the operator is just someone pressing a button in the cab of the truck. Hopefully this extra volume doesn't end up reducing the life span of our dump.

The usual practice is that trash is only picked up every two weeks, while recycling and green bin are picked up weekly, so it is in people's interest to practice good recycling to get rid of their waste more quickly.

[danbrotherston]

Waste collection in our city in NL:

- Garbage: In the bin at the end of the road, collected by the city as needed.
- Recycling, monthly, paper in one bin, plastic + metal in another bin, we put the bins on the sidewalk, and the truck comes along with a double arm and picks up two at a time. It takes all of 5 minutes to collect the entire blocks worth of bins (maybe 40 homes).
- Compost, every two weeks, same kind of bin, but with an electric truck which is nearly silent.
- Glass and textiles, a few centralised bins we must carry stuff too, and separate colours of glass....this is the only annoying part because it's relatively far away.
- Some plastic drinking containers (and beer bottles) have a deposit on them that you get back if you return them to the store you bought them at and put them in the slow and problematic machine (IMO this is poorly implemented).

FWIW...the system is ... complicated...but does work reasonably well.

It's also interesting that nobody puts any kind of liner in their compost bin (which again, is bi-weekly collection) they just throw raw food and scraps in the bin. Yeah, you get some bugs in summer but like, it's not that big a deal (it helps that most people don't have a huge amount of meat in the bin).

But also the bins are not unique to Europe...my parents had the bin collection in their home in St. Marys. I'm kind of surprised the region didn't do the bin collection the last time the contract was signed, my understanding is that it is much cheaper because it takes less labour.

[ac3r]

Compared to the way we do waste management here to places like Japan, South Korea, EU it's so archaic. Small steps here, I suppose, but we really need to pick things up. Instead of banning bread tags and straws, we need proper investment into infrastructure to minimize waste and maximize the reuse of any we do generate.

This is true for all of North America, but locally too. The fact this region has clung on to the goofy tiny blue box thing so many decades it's a good example. It's ridiculous to be doing that lol. The inefficiencies of running hundreds of diesel trucks every day of the week to pick up dirty margarine containers and crap, accelerating and braking every 30 feet for 1/4th a wheelbarrow of junk is an irony. We should have been using either larger wheely bin containers long ago, or better yet do it in a way it is done in many EU nations. Most neighbourhoods in cities will use a combination of wheeled bins, or a series of rather large communal bins for recyclables such as a few for different coloured glass and metals. Rubbish and organics have more direct collection, but it's still often combined in larger volumes. There's also quite often a broader system of deposit/returnable bottle use, similar to that in Quebec where regular drink containers can often also get returned.

Would be better if we just totally reformed and modernized the thing, though. We bury hundreds of millions of dollars worth of material and potential energy each year. All our politicians are seemingly too stupid to do anything about it though.

[tomh009]

Japan does not use wheeled bins for recycling, either. Their recycling rules are stricter than ours, but I don't think those rules would work here.