City needs everyone pitching into green bins: mayor

By Laurie Watt Barrie Advance September 26 2013
Barrie needs to get condo and apartment dwellers pitching into reducing their waste, Mayor Jeff Lehman said.
The city is cutting back garbage collection to every second week in 2015 to prompt you to recycle and better use your green bins, which will still be collected weekly.
But the proposed eight-year waste management contract doesn’t propose extending the green bin program to condos, apartments and townhouse complexes, even as Barrie aims to increase its diversion rate to 60 per cent from 45 per cent.
“There are something like 15,000 multi-residential units in Barrie – or something like 30,000 people – who don’t get green bin service today. If we’re serious about diversion, we need to provide this service to everyone, not just single detached residences,” Lehman told The Advance.
“There are many more townhouse projects and apartment buildings proposed around the city and they will be an increasing part of our community in the future, so this will only become more important in terms of diverting waste.”
Lehman said the growing multi-residential sector includes more than the series of Lakeshore Drive towers. There are low-rise and high-rise buildings, townhouse and stacked townhouse developments throughout the city.
In the works are many more – with towers and townhomes on Bradford Street, stacked townhomes in the Ferndale/Ardagh area, four apartment buildings and townhouses on Essa Road and a proposal for 1,241 homes at 700 and 725 Mapleview Drive East.
Last November, as council approved the city’s sustainable waste management strategy, council directed staff to expand diversion programs to multi-residential areas.
The strategy sets out a plan to extend the lifespan of the landfill to 2035 and achieve the 60-per-cent diversion target.
Staff came up with an array of strategies, including the every-second-week collection, but said the multi-residential plan, which would boost diversion by another 2.8 per cent immediately, was too expensive and complex to consider until at least 2015, a year after the eight-year contract begins.
Lehman said he had trouble buying that rationale and noted the pricing city staff got was higher than the rates in private multi-residential contracts.
“The cost was surprisingly high. I know what they pay for private haulers,” he said. “I’d have expected it to be lower, because of the economies of scale.”