GUELPH – Wellington County staff will prepare tender documents for curbside waste and recycling collection, including options for two different new service models, as well as the current system, in order to assess the best process moving forward.
The county’s current curbside collection contract, in place since June 2009, was set to expire in June 2019.
A one-year extension was negotiated.
“In order to meet a new contract commencement date of July 1, 2020, a curbside collection contract will need to be tendered in the very near term,” explained solid waste services manager Das Soligo in a report.
Option 1 is a variation of the current curbside collection program and would maintain many of its key components, such as:
– collection of bagged waste and two-stream blue box recycling;
– manual collection; and
– a user pay system for bagged waste.
Differences between Option 1 and the current curbside service include an increase in collection frequency for rural residents (from bi-weekly to weekly) and an expansion of curbside collection to both sides on all rural roads.
Option 1 would not include organics collection.
“Standardizing the level of service between rural and urban areas would not only remove a potential barrier to utilizing the curbside collection program, but it would also provide every county resident a consistent and equal level of service,” Soligo notes in his report.
“Further, there is a risk that once Ontario’s blue box programs transition to full producer responsibility, existing levels of recycling collection service will be locked in, and will not be able to be enhanced or altered in any significant way. Standardizing the collection services in advance of the transition … will mitigate the risk that these types of decisions will not be allowed in the future.”
Option 2 provides the ability to add curbside collection of organics to all households in the county, while maintaining the core services of Option 1.
“With the introduction of a weekly organics collection service, waste collection is proposed to change to a bi-weekly frequency. This is a common practice in other municipalities, as the more odorous waste materials can be managed in the organics waste stream,” Soligo notes in his report.
“A lower cost organics collection option would be to provide green bin service in urban areas only.”
For the purposes of contractors bidding on Option 2, staff recommended that All Treat Farms in Arthur be identified as the processing facility for organics.
“It’s believed that choosing All Treat will allow the bidders on these proposals to realize collection efficiencies as All Treat is in the county and they would have efficiencies of trucking distances,” explained councillor Gregg Davidson, SWS committee chair at the March 28 county council meeting.
“All Treat also has the capacity to accept our organic material … there’s not many processors in the province that have capacity right now.”
“Why wasn’t it left up to the collectors of the garbage to put that in their proposal as to who they may want to look after the organics?” asked councillor Don McKay.
Davidson replied that choosing another processor would mean trucking the material outside Wellington County.
“Then you’re adding time to have the processor drive to those locations,” he stated.
Staff recommend the inclusion of two additional service options in the curbside collection RFP.
Contractors will be asked to provide a price for:
– bulky item collection (e.g. furniture and appliances) once a month, year-round;
– leaf and yard waste, weekly during April, May, October and November (leaf and yard waste would be collected at curbside at no cost, and would need to be set out in a brown paper leaf and yard waste bag).
“Some towns/townships currently provide variations of leaf and yard waste management services, while others do not,” the report explains.
“Including it as an option will provide council the information to decide whether to add this service into the next curbside collection contract. These service options would have the ability to be added to the curbside collection program at the outset, or at any time throughout the term of the contract.”
The report indicates bulk item collection is not recommended at this time.
“Including it as an option provides a service alternative should council re-assess waste facility utilization,” the report states.
Davidson noted the option of obtaining prices on status quo service was added to the staff recommendations at the committee level, in order to ensure a good basis of comparison.
Davidson said the staff report recommends the county continue with the yellow bag user pay program, rather than moving to an automated cart collection service as used in some, primarily urban, areas.
“The report also recommends that the blue box recycling program remains dual stream as we have now … and also that we not expand what we put in the blue box at the present time,” said Davidson. “The province envisions the standardizing of the blue box recycling system, so there’s no sense in us making changes until that comes through.”
County council endorsed the committee recommendation that specifications in the two identified options be included in the tender documents and that All Treat Farms Ltd., of Arthur, be identified as the destination for organics processing.
Warden Kelly Linton stressed, “The county has not decided to move on any one of these three options. They’re going out to tender to get prices back so we can have a full discussion.”
