Commercial recycler concerned about City’s mandatory program

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on August 31, 2022.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Public engagement will begin early next year with business owners about the city’s mandatory recycling and organics program.

The program was launched in 2020 but because of COVID, it was put on hold, says the City.

With the organics facility here now, the city will be relaunching the program and adding mandatory organics.

The city’s Waste and Recycling Department is “working on tools to help assist with options,” says the City.

A city commercial recycler said Tuesday, though, he has concerns the mandatory program could put him out of business.

Barry Sedgwick said he fears losing his roughly 30 business customers because they will already be paying for a recycling service which could make his unnecessary.

Sedgwick started out in residential recycling in the early 2000s at one time employing four part-time staff and doing pickups in all areas of the city on a weekly basis.

“It was getting better and better,” Sedgwick said. But with the implementation of the City’s blue bin recycling program, he ended up changing focus and now just does commercial, mainly hauling cardboard.

The City, in response to an email, said the program “is not intended to put anyone out of business or make things difficult. There will be public engagement with business owners in late January/early February about mandatory recycling and organics.

“This is all part of the Business Waste Diversion Strategy that has been updated to council every March/April.”

City council on July 20, 2015 approved its waste diversion policy which directed the Waste and Recycling department to develop disposal and waste diversion targets for three distinct sectors – residential; construction and demolition; and industrial, commercial and institutional.

The purpose was “to provide guidelines to encourage the efficient use of natural resources with the guiding principle to treat the waste stream as “resource not waste,” which fits in with council’s environmental policy set up to reduce the city’s ecological footprint.

In March of 2020, the City says information sessions were conducted for businesses, processors and haulers to explain the mandatory program.

A 2009 master plan for waste diversion and prevention recommended the city’s business sector “be a priority target for waste reduction and diversion initiatives,” says the City.

Sedgwick said one of his customers told him a person from the City came by recently to tell her the program will be introduced next year.

That customer told him the business doesn’t have a lot of recycling as it is.

“I guess if they do that (mandatory recycling) then I’m out to lunch. I can only offer so much,” said Sedgwick, who takes the cardboard material he collects to Waste Connections. Ninety per cent of the material he collects is cardboard, he added.

“I don’t know what will happen…it will make it tougher,” he added.

“Are they going to pay both of us?” he asked of customers.

“We’re actually supposed to be their boss, they’re not supposed to be our boss,” said Sedgwick of the City.

Sedgwick said “they want everybody recycling which is a good thing” adding however that businesses should be able to recycle how they want,

“I’m just worried I’m going to lose them, too,” he said of his commercial customers.

“All mine are little. I don’t have any construction sites or anything like that,” he said of his customer base.

Sedgwick said efforts to have a referendum years ago on the blue bin program failed. A petition that generated 4,100 responses couldn’t convince council at the time to hold a referendum on this use.

A letter to the editor by now councillor Rajko Dodic on May 30, 2017 addressed the petition saying “what citizens are asking for is the chance to vote on an issue that has divided council previously. If the vote is ‘yes,’ everyone can rest easy that they had a chance to vote on it at least once. If the vote is ‘no,’ council can ignore it.

“Council had numerous chances to vote on the issue; please let the citizens have one chance to do so,” said Dodic in his letter.

While Sedgwick said the petition didn’t reflect 10 per cent of the city’s population, it was 10 per cent of the voting population and a referendum should have been held.

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