Aaron Beres of Loraas Environmental Services Ltd., top centre, spoke to council about the city's recycling at Monday's Zoom meeting. (Angela Brown/battlefordsNOW Staff)

By Angela Brown

Recycling progress

City recycling program sees significant improvement

Jul 21, 2020 | 5:00 PM

From bad to much better.

North Battleford residents are receiving praise for improving their recycling habits significantly, based on Loraas Environmental Services Ltd.’s latest report.

“We heard pretty directly from Loraas that our efforts are working,” Mayor Ryan Bater said. “In fact, North Battleford has become a leader within Saskatchewan.”

Loraas Environmental gave an update to council Monday on the program.

The city worked to educate the public and enforced fines for those who continued to dispose of trash in their recycling bins in an effort to improve numbers.

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“We want to be a city that gets the recycling program right,” Bater said. “We want to do this well. And we are learning as we go.”

The mayor said the city’s enforcement efforts have had a positive effect both in saving the city’s landfill as well as improving its relationship with its recycling contractor.

Bater said the city will continue to increase awareness so everyone understands what can be recycled and what cannot.

“I think as a city we can take pride in programs like this,” Bater said. “If we are going to do something, we ought to do it right.”

Loraas Environmental Services general manager Aaron Beres advised the city more people are placing only accepted products in their recycling bins now, which has helped the recycling program’s success.

“We are getting to acceptable levels,” Beres said. “The employees really appreciate the city’s efforts on this because it allows us to do our job, which is what the city is paying us to do — divert these materials and get them to a different market.

W’e can now say the vast majority of material we are collecting is getting recycled.”

Before many people changed their ways, he said, Loraas’ concern was that “we were basically sending everything to the landfill.”

As an example, Beres said half empty jars of peanut butter thrown into the recycling would spoil the entire load of a Loraas truck pick up single collection which was the contents of 450 recycling carts.

Beres said when the pandemic first struck Saskatchewan, and more people were staying home, it appeared many were using their recycle bins as a second garbage container, which increased recycling contamination dramatically.

He commended North Battleford in particular for its recent proactive efforts, reflecting in much improved numbers for the city since then.

From May 4 the city was seeing 100 per cent contamination in recycling collected, causing full loads to be sent to the landfill. (Contamination of more than 60 per cent was recorded as 100 per cent.) However, by July the city saw a notable improvement, with as low as 15 per cent contamination on July 3 as a positive sign it is making progress.

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angela.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsNOW