The local Crime Stoppers organization is getting set to launch a campaign against illegal dumping.
“The idea is that Crime Stoppers is the tool that can be used by the public to report incidents of illegal dumping,” Crime Stoppers Guelph Wellington coordinator Sarah Bowers-Peter told Wellington County council on March 30.
“This is actually a provincial initiative through the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry and initially we were hoping to be part of their campaign, but we do it in Centre Wellington anyway so we’re going to localize it and make it our own,” said Bowers-Peter.
Bowers-Peter noted illegal dumping has significant impacts.
“I don’t think I have to explain to anyone here the costs that are incurred because of this activity, whether it’s environmental, agricultural, damage to personal or public property, costs of cleaning it up or policing in the case of the county or a bylaw infraction – so we certainly recognize that this is a huge impact on the community,” she stated.
Councillor Don McKay, chair of the county’s solid waste services committee, said county residents have expressed concern to him about the problem.
“Over the years I’ve got a number of calls from residents about people dumping things on the side of the road – ‘What can we do about it?’ – usually it’s hard to catch these people, but if we can get people to be more aware of what’s going on we can get our citizens to help curtail some of this activity,” McKay suggested.
He said county staff has already done “a bang-up job” preparing promotional materials for the program, which will be officially launched on April 20.
