City relaunches mandatory recycling program for business

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on January 27, 2023.

Herald file photo - A truck leaves the city's waste and recycling centre.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

A mandatory recycling program for businesses and organizations has been relaunched after the initiative was put on hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The City is also introducing a mandatory organics program for both.

Felipe Pereira de Albuquerque, a junior waste diversion engineer with the City, said Thursday that the recycling program and mandatory organics are part of a strategy approved by city council in 2015 that aims to achieve 50 per cent waste reduction by 2030.

Industrial, commercial and institutional as well as construction/demolition sectors generate about two-thirds of the garbage in Lethbridge, he said.

“So even a small reduction in those sectors represent a big impact in overall Lethbridge waste generation,” he said.

Both programs are now in effect but surcharges at the landfill will not start until Sept. 5 to give businesses time to adapt.

An open house is planned at City Hall on Tuesday from 3 until 7 p.m. for businesses to ask questions of city staff about the program, Albuquerque said.

The landfill surcharge for designated materials is for those materials if they’re mixed with other garbage.

Surcharges exist for paper, cardboard, wood and construction materials so if a load has more than 25 per cent of one of those materials, the entire load is surcharged per tonne, the engineer said. Other materials covered by the surcharge include concrete, brick and masonry block, asphalt shingles and pavement, and scrap metals and drywall, says information on the City website.

The engineer said he thinks the business community supports the initiative but a copy of a letter to the City that was provided to media by the Chamber of Commerce Thursday suggests otherwise.

The letter to mayor Blaine Hyggen, city council and City Manager Lloyd Brierley from Chamber CEO Cyndi Bester requests that the City put a pause on implementation of the program to ensure businesses are aware of it and “to reduce the amount of municipal government over-reach built into the system.

“Red tape around organics disposal is not something that business can add to the already growing list of concerns,” writes Bester.

“While we applaud a program in concept, in implementation of (a) Business Waste, Recycling & Organics program there was insufficient consultation with the business community. The resulting program is felt to be performed with overreach and places an undue cost on Lethbridge businesses to remain in compliance,” says Bester in her letter.

“The details of the Business Waste, Recycling & Organics program came as a surprise to many in the business community and have left many others with a sense of confusion. This could have been easily avoided with proper consultation during the creation of this program, as opposed to providing information after the fact. Consultations with the business community which occurred in 2013 during the development of the Waste Diversion Policy are not reflective of the business landscape nearly a decade later.

“Moreover, ‘Stakeholder Information Sessions’ – attended by 80 non-residential participants, in a city with over 3,000 active business licenses – held in March 2020 at a time when business owners were otherwise occupied with the looming possibility of strict COVID-19 measures, which were implemented just 10 days later, is insufficient to inform the business community about these programs. We see the evidence of this in the number of shocked, confused and upset business owners in the wake of Town Hall information sessions,’ says Bester in her letter.

Bester added that the Chamber and business community support the concept of bringing Lethbridge into line with the rest of Canada with a strong recycling and organics program and asks that the City “treat Lethbridge business owners and their employees like adults and stop trying to pay parent where it is unnecessary and unwelcome.”

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