The Strathcona Regional District (SRD) plan to increase the yield of recyclable materials, collected by the curbside pick-up program on Cortes Island, officially went into effect yesterday.
Engineering Services Coordinator Sheena Fisher gave the Electoral Area Services Committee (EASC) an update at their May 10 meeting.
“I believe it was at the last EASC meeting, that we introduced a letter that we received from Recycle BC where they were asking us to develop a remediation plan to increase the yield of the curbside recycling. When we received that letter in January, we began explorations and discussions with our partners, and providing the service, being our collection contractor and Comox Strathcona Waste Management to develop possible avenues to meet the objectives or the requirements of Recycle BC.”
“We put that together in a draft plan for Recycle BC, which was submitted on time. They have subsequently accepted the plan. We’ve already started putting things into motion, even though it doesn’t technically start until May 15th. The main drivers of that plan are mostly around promotion and education, informing residents about the service, the benefit that it provides, as well as letting them know the impacts should the incentives from recycle BC be diminished or taken away if we’re not successful, which is a loss of that funding and likely increase to the user fees.”
“One of the big things that we’re working on is adding glass back into the collection, which poses a number of logistic and safety concerns. We’re working with the collection contractor on how to accommodate that.”
“The collection volumes increase over the summer regardless, just due to an influx of visitors and people on the island. Which limits their ability to add this new material on their normal runs. We are asking them for some proposals to add a separate day of glass collection once a month to see if that can be delivered without increasing the service costs this year, just so we can get an idea of how much glass we’ve even able to collect on island and if it’s a viable product to help us meet those weights.”
“Glass is nice and heavy, so we’re hoping that it gives us a lot of bang for our bucks. But the collection contractor has already stated that most of the glass that they used to receive was refundables, which will not count towards our weights.”
“We’re meeting with Recycle BC in June to have some more discussions and Recycle. BC is also going to visit the island so that they can get a feel for the unique culture and solid waste management habits of island residents that they might not be expecting seeing as they’re all based in the urban environment of Metro Vancouver.”
“We haven’t started the educational campaign. It will include an insert to the user invoices that are going to be sent out in May or June, so that we send a direct pamphlet to everybody who’s part of the service. We’re hoping that will be an effective way of reaching everybody as well as a website and putting up some posters in high volume areas such as the ferry terminals and the grocery stores . We’re definitely open to suggestions about other locations that might meet the qualification of high-volume area, but that’s where we’re at.”
Regional Director Robyn Mawhinney, of Area C, asked “I was curious about the measuring, how frequently is this happening and how concerned are Recycle BC. Is it a three month timeline or are they watching it by the week? How’s that being tabulated?”
Fisher replied, “Essentially, this is a six month plan, thank you.”
Mark Vonesch, the Regional Director for Cortes Island said, “I just want to thank Sheena and Wolfgang for their work on this.”
“Cortes Island is really concerned about recycling. I want to definitely increase their volume.
“It was a surprise to a lot of folks on Cortes that so much of the curbside pickup was being subsidized. It’s been educational for a lot of folks and look forward to making progress on this. Thank you.”
Top image credit: Screenshot of Sheena Fisher, Engineering Services Coordinator for the SRD, speaking to the EASC committee on May 10 – from the meeting video.
Charts taken from the associated SRD staff report.
Sign-up for Cortes Currents email-out:
To receive an emailed catalogue of articles on Cortes Currents, send a (blank) email to subscribe to your desired frequency:
- Daily, (articles posted during the last 24 hours) – cortescurrents-daily+subscribe@cortes.groups.io
- Weekly Digest cortescurrents – cortescurrents-weekly+subscribe@cortes.groups.io