County’s trash tonnage decreasing with new biweekly pick-up

About 8 waste collection staff have been in self-isolation with symptoms of illness whether or not related to COVID-19: county official

By Jessica Owen April 16 2020

Editor’s note: As a separated city, Barrie takes care of its own waste collection. The County of Simcoe, however, handles wastes for the towns and townships outside the city limits.

County of Simcoe officials have said they don’t have plans to increase garbage bag limits in light of COVID-19, because based on their monitoring, garbage tonnage has actually decreased.

Rob McCullough, the county’s director of solid waste management, sat down with Village Media this week to talk about the county’s waste management response to COVID-19, new policies in place to protect workers and residents and how the switch the biweekly collection has changed the game.

While McCullough says the county did propose increasing garbage-bag limits for residents to their supplier Waste Connections in light of COVID-19, he said it didn’t make sense in the current climate.

“We reasonably agree with their position, which is that it is a tenuous collection situation right now already,” said McCullough.

“As soon as any worker exhibits any symptoms – whether or not it’s COVID-19 related – they’re being asked to stay home in the event it may be COVID-19. They don’t want to spread it,” he said. “Because of that, we’ve had times over the past three weeks where we’ve had as many as eight staff who are in self-isolation for up to 14 days.”

McCullough says county staff are monitoring how much garbage is being picked up and says they haven’t yet seen an increase in the amount of garbage to warrant increasing bag limits for everyone.

“We’re watching the tonnages very, very closely,” he said. “Our numbers are actually showing us that people are doing a great job of separating more of their materials into the organics stream. Because of that, the tonnage of our garbage has stayed the same or decreased.”

The contract for solid waste management through the County of Simcoe is done with Waste Connections, previously called BFI.

Last summer, county officials confirmed major delays in pick up caused primarily by a labour shortage led to the county hiring an outside contractor, Miller Waste to help pick up the slack for areas that were missed. Terra was also on call to help with any further delays.

Since the county moved to its new biweekly collection schedule in February, McCullough says there haven’t been any full routes missed, aside from a few streets here and there that he says are normal and can be attributed to human error.

“It’s been quite successful,” said McCullough. “It kind of got going at the same time as the COVID-19 response, so thank goodness we did (make the change), because if we’d had to deal with the shortages in addition to the COVID-19 response, we would have been in really bad shape.”

McCullough says county transfer station sites were closed for about a week as part of the emergency response and four sites reopened on March 30 for urgent/critical drop-offs only: North Simcoe in Midland, West Gwillimbury in Bradford, Nottawasaga in Stayner, and Oro in Edgar. All four sites are open from Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

When asked what constitutes an urgent or critical drop-off, McCullough said the county is leaving that to the discretion of residents.
“We re-opened those sites because we know some residents and small businesses use that and have a necessary urgent or emergent need to use it,” he said. “We’re not policemen. We’re not going to police that.

We’re asking residents to use their own best judgment. We haven’t turned anyone away, except those who are not from our area.”

Due to COVID-19, some changes have been made to collection to make the process safer and address resident concerns. For example, diapers can now be put into clear plastic bags and put out with garbage, and doesn’t count toward the garbage bag limit. Also, all materials going into the green bin including tissues must now be bagged inside the bin to protect collectors.

“With everyone being home and the weather starting to turn nicer, people are getting out and cleaning up their yards. About half the loads we were seeing were leaf and yard waste, so we started our leaf and yard waste pick up early,” said McCullough.

Early curbside yard waste pick up started the week of April 6. To find out when your curbside yard waste will next be picked up or for more information on County of Simcoe waste collection, click here.