The city’s week-long free bulky item pick-up was a free-for-all.
Residents were invited to put out their bulky items – according to a very detailed, specific list of acceptable refuse – at curbside for a trial event aimed at helping to clean up Orillia’s neighbourhoods.
In many ways, it worked.
Piles of tires and mountains of mattresses were placed alongside old desks and couches and wonky electronics and all sorts of the dastardly detritus that collects in our basements and garages and backyards.
“The participation rate was certainly quite high,” said Greg Preston, the city’s manager of waste management. “We don’t have actual participation numbers, for a variety of reasons, but just from a visual standpoint of seeing what was at the curb, it was very popular.”
During the week-long event that wrapped up last Saturday, crews collected 166 metric tonnes of garbage that went into the landfill. In addition, 93 metric tonnes of ‘divertable’ waste was collected.
“Those are preliminary numbers,” said Preston, who concedes it was disappointing that so much of what was collected had to be trucked to the Kitchener Street landfill. “That’s only a 36 per cent diversion rate, so we collected a lot more waste material than divertable materials.”
He noted the divertable goods were mostly composed of wooden furniture, mattresses, box springs, refrigeration equipment, scrap metal and tires.
“The wood (from furniture) is ground up and used as an aggregate replacement on our roads” at the landfill, Preston explained. “Those roads can get quite muddy, so we use that to build up the roads.”
He noted those numbers don’t necessarily tell the whole story. Treasure hunters were out in droves on the eve of the event, scouring city streets as if the city was a giant garage sale.
“It was quite interesting to see people come along and pick up things – there were a number of people with trucks and trailers out and about,” said Preston. “I myself put out a bookshelf and a futon and within two hours, only the futon mattress was left. So, certainly a significant portion was diverted through the treasure hunt component.”
Things did not go as smoothly as hoped. Many people did not heed the guidelines and put out things that were not eligible to be picked up. That slowed down the process, forced the city to issue public pleas for citizens to be more careful and required the five-day event to drag into a sixth day.
Despite that, the project did not trash the budget. The company contracted for the job was paid “just under $30,000,” which was a fixed sum, said Preston.
He said city council approved a $40,000 budget for the project; other money was spent on advertising and related fees.
Preston said staff will take what they learned and create a report for city council with recommendations if another bulk item pickup is pondered by the next council.
He said it’s likely staff would recommend less of a free-for-all. In fact, they originally recommended a pay-for-pickup service. Under that plan, residents would have paid $50 to have up to five large items picked up during a one-day blitz; they would have been charged $15 for each additional item.
“Because there were no limits to what a person could set out, we really didn’t have an idea of what we would get,” said Preston. He noted a future request for quotes from potential contractors will likely be higher as influenced by how much trash was collected during this event.
While the post-mortem continues, staff are still dealing with the fallout from the event. Bylaw enforcement officers have been busy this week asking citizens to clean up anything that wasn’t collected during the blitz.
Shawn Crawford, the city’s manager of legislative services, said staff are giving tardy residents a warning. He said, typically, homeowners are given 48 hours to comply, but he noted they are working with residents who require more time.
If a citizen doesn’t comply, the city could have the garbage removed and bill the homeowner, Crawford said. “But that’s a last-resort kind of scenario that we’re trying to avoid,” he said.
