Mountainview residents are feeling a little more comfortable with the Town’s biweekly pick-up pilot with changes made, though they say the program is still unsettling. Ryan Nix lives in Mountainview, one of two Okotoks neighbourhoods chosen for a pilot project that would see black bins picked up every second week from June through September. He, and two other area residents, met with Town staff May 11 to discuss their concerns with the plan and present a 650-signature petition against it. Their primary concerns were over a lack of public consultation prior to launching the pilot, as well as insufficient accommodations for those residents who would not be able to wait two weeks to have their garbage emptied, mainly those with young children in diapers. “It went relatively well,” said Nix. “They acknowledged they had done a poor job communicating the purpose of the pilot and engaging with residents, so that was nice. They apologized for that.” Before the meeting, the Town decided to make some changes to its proposed pilot to accommodate concerns waste services staff were hearing from residents, he said. Residents in Mountainview and Woodhaven can go online and request the 180-litre garbage bin if they feel the standard 120-litre cart won’t manage their waste for two full weeks, he said. In addition, the extra garbage bags the Town was going to provide at $4.50 each will be given for free. “That did diffuse a few of our concerns having to do with the rebates offered initially and the cost of the additional bags and larger bins,” said Nix. “But we still have some concerns regarding methodology that was used to come to the conclusion the biweekly service should be done.” He said the Town’s waste audits may not be revealing the whole truth. Auditors will take a look through black bins at random to determine the percentage of garbage, recyclables or organics in the cart, and recent audits revealed about 30 per cent of black bin waste is actually organics and 45 per cent is recyclables. But Nix said it’s not that simple. “We don’t feel they’re looking at the whole system of all three bins at once,” he said. “If you fill up your blue bin and have no room for recyclables but the black bin is half-empty, instead of keeping that stuff and saving it for a week it’s natural for people to put that into the black bin.” He said the black bins aren’t too big, it’s the blue bins that are too small given the amount of packaging and other recyclable material coming into households on a regular basis. Similarly, the green carts could be too small, especially in summer months, when yard waste eats up a lot of space, he said. “The focus of Okotoks waste has just been the black bin for this project, and we as a group think it shouldn’t be looked at in isolation, it needs to be looked at overall with all three, and what happens with overflow from one bin to another.” By simply reducing garbage collection services by half, he said the Town is opening the gates to less-than-ideal situations. People could start dumping illegally in construction sites or in the MD, he said. There is also some concern about people who are away on garbage day, he said, because they may not get their carts out and would essentially have a month between services. The group plans to continue fighting for a better way of addressing waste collection issues in Okotoks. “We’re looking at the next step at bringing this to council and getting it in front of them,” said Nix. Okotoks waste services manager Paul Lyons said the biweekly pick-up isn’t the only idea been floated to reduce the amount waste being sent to the landfill. Another pilot program will take place at the same time in another neighbourhood, though the chosen community has not been released yet. “We will ask this community to put out their carts only when they are full, and this will allow us to see how frequently the residents in this neighbourhood are putting their carts out,” said Lyons. He said both pilots will provide the Town with information it can use to determine the best ideas to implement in order to achieve its goal of 80 per cent waste diversion. Currently, Okotoks diverts about 61 per cent of waste from the landfill with its blue and green carts, he said. There are a number of things they’re looking for. “We will learn how frequent the waste needs to be set out, we will learn through our waste audits, we’re going to do the volume of waste that’s been put into the carts whenever we do those audits,” said Lyons. “We will learn what residents liked or disliked about the pilot program, and as we go forward we would have residents’ input in what the program looks like at the end.” Feedback will be provided by means of surveys at the beginning and end of each pilot, he said. Two public information sessions on the programs will take place on May 24.
