Halifax council to consider bag-free garbage and recycling system
Posted Jun 22, 2020 06:43:51 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Disposing of garbage and recyclables in plastic bags could soon be a system of the past in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
When regional council meets virtually on Tuesday, it is set to discuss a staff report that came back in March on transitioning to a cart-based waste program.
Councillor Sam Austin, who represents Dartmouth Centre, suggested a report on the idea in January 2019.
“It was when HRM was considering a plastic bag ban, before the province moved in and made that their own policy, some of the feedback that came in very loud and clear to council was that we were being a bit hypocritical by looking at banning plastic shopping bags, when requiring everyone put out all these bags to get rid of garbage,” he says.
The report came back to council in March.
It finds there are significant costs to transition HRM's solid waste program to a cart-based collection system, with an upfront capital investment for purchase and distribution of the garbage and recycling carts in the range of $26.34 to $30.48 million. The total estimated annual operating cost is about $1.1 to $1.2 million which includes $465,000 in costs associated with managing the existing green cart program.
Austin says it's expected the additional tax cost of the carts would be returned to households within about six years of having one.
“It eliminates the cost for the household to buy blue bags and the payback period for the average household is about six years which is a pretty darn good return on investment,” he says.
Austin says if council decides to go ahead with the cart program, it will be years before it's actually implemented because of the complexity of transitioning and the pandemic's financial implications on the municipality.
“Certainly in the midst of COVID we can't take on an extra like this, but we can carry on with the analysis and be ready to do carts if that's where we want to go,” he says.
The report finds the life-span of a cart is about 10 to 15 years and would take about 8.3 to 12.2 years to achieve a net reduction of plastic when comparing the weight of the plastic carts to the annual estimated weight of plastic bags used per household.
Councillor Richard Zurawski is on the board of directors for Divert Nova Scotia, which is a not-for-profit corporation championing recycling in Nova Scotia. He says he will support Austin's motion to switch to the cart-based program even though it has limited environmental impact.
Zurawski says it's important to first reduce the waste that goes into the system through Extended Producer Responsibility, which the province would need to implement.
“In every jurisdiction that it has been put in, it reduces the amount of waste municipalities have to handle and puts the onus on the businesses that produce it,” he says. “And since we are paying for it already, there is no reason we shouldn't.”
Zurawkski says moving to a cart program is not addressing the larger problem.
“This current provincial government is not instituting EPR which has been shown to be a benefit to us and lower costs right across the board,” he says.
He says every municipality in the province has agreed and petitioned the province to have EPR implemented, but they are still waiting on a decision.
