Public input sought regarding county’s waste-disposal options

By Ian McInroy, Barrie Examiner

Simcoe County is looking at its future recycling and waste-disposal options, and it’s looking for input from county residents.

The county’s Solid Waste Management Strategy has recommended the potential development of two infrastructure projects — an organics processing facility (OPF) and a materials management facility (MMF) — to help accommodate future growth.

Public information sessions by the county Tuesday at the Simcoe County Museum provided details on the projects and outlined the process of determining where the two facilities would be located and what the next steps would be.

Rob McCullough, the county’s director of solid waste management, said the previous county council decided to develop those projects to the point where a site could be identified.

“We’ve got a new county council. They will have a decision to make, whether we go ahead with that or not,” he said, adding gathering public input at the earliest stages of the process about where the two facilities could be located is important.

“This is a process to determine potential sites. They are very different siting priorities,” McCullough said. “We know we’re going to grow in the future. You build for what you need in 20 years.”

Currently, source-separated organics from the county are transported to Hamilton, recycling goes to Toronto and garbage is trucked to Peel Region.

The materials-management facility being considered by the county would be the link between collection operations and final waste-disposal and processing locations, and similar to where the county currently trucks its garbage — to a south-Barrie location.

“All our 60 trucks essentially go there at the end of the day and dump their material. And there’s 15 to 20 transfer trucks that come out the next morning hauling the stuff that was dropped the night before,” McCullough said.

He said the facility could cost between $5 million and $6 million, depending on funding. After five or six years, when the facility is paid for, savings to taxpayers could be between $600,000 and $1 million annually, depending on what is built and the amount of funding.

It would provide a location for consolidation of waste. There would be no long-term storage of materials and no public drop-off.

“We’ve been granted funding for this project. But it only funds 50% of the project’s blue-box recyclable imprint,” he said. “We think we could possibly get $1 million in funding for the portion of it that would would be dedicated to blue-box recyclables.”

The organics-processing facility is a different kind of operation, McCullough said.

“The (price of the) organic facility will all depend on the technology that will be picked and what we want to do. We’re looking for higher recycling rates,” he said, adding getting other items into the organic recycling stream — such as pet waste, diapers and feminine hygiene products — would also be considered.

McCullough is quick to point out development of the two facilities is in the early stages and deciding where the facilities would be located is why the public’s input is so important.

Comments or questions can be submitted anytime before Jan. 15 at simcoe.ca/opf andsimcoe.ca/mmf.

“It’s late spring when we’re narrowing it down to three to five sites and it’s the fall where we hope to select the preferred site,” he said, adding it all hinges on county council’s approval. “If it flies through, probably the quickest we could see operating would be four to five years out.”