A community meeting will be taking place tonight (June 7) at the 108 Mile Community Centre to address the contamination of curbside recyclables.
Supervisor of solid waste management with the Cariboo Regional District, Tera Grady says one of the types of contaminants that end up in recycling totes are items that are not part of the Recycle BC Program.
“Such as organics or pet waste, personal hygiene or medical products, wood waste or metal waste. There’s a lot of clothing…They need to go elsewhere. They either need to go in the garbage or go into 100 Mile House to a scrap metal dealer or to a secondhand store or give them to somebody else who’s going to use them or sell them at a yard sale. There are different avenues to keep them from the landfill, but they just can’t go into the curbside tote.”
Grady says also ending up in recycling totes are plastic bags, styrofoam, and glass which although are recyclable are not permitted under the program which is also offered in the District of 100 Mile House and City of Williams Lake.
An audit of over 300 recycling totes in the 108 Ranch May 3 and May 4 found that 63% of them were contaminated.
Tonight’s meeting, in which there will be door prizes, starts at 6pm.
“After this meeting, we’re going to redo those audits for the month of June and look at our results,” says Grady noting that almost 1,000 homes have been audited for the month of May.
“We’d like to see a big improvement in the audits after the meeting and throughout the summer we’ll be doing spot audits focusing on the homes that had problems and speaking with those homeowners. If people aren’t able to figure the program out and use it properly there will be individual homes that will not be collected if we’re seeing repeated contamination over and over again.”