Check your tote bins, electoral area residents. Sometime over the next two months you will receive a survey from the CVRD asking your thoughts on the possibility of enhancing curbside collection in your area.
The notes will appear on residents’ recycling bins between now and Nov. 23.
Your choices: keep things the same, or check the boxes of the new services you’d like to see offered: organics for example. Once the survey is filled out, simply reattach it to your recycling tote bin for pickup on the next recycling day.
“The results of the survey will be used to inform CVRD staff and board of directors of the curbside collection preferences of residents in these areas,” said CVRD waste management manager Tauseef Waraich in a press release.
Not all electoral areas are serviced the same.
Areas A, B, C, and H only have their recycling picked up by the CVRD. Garbage has been contracted out.
Areas D, E, F, G, and I receive recycling and garbage collection from the CVRD.
Some homes don’t get any pick-up at all.
“There are currently 5,000 homes in the electoral areas that do not have bylaw-mandated garbage collection, which sees residents self-managing approximately 1,500 tonnes of garbage annually,” Waraich said. “Implementing a bylaw-mandated garbage collection service could see lower incidences of illegal dumping and burning of garbage.”
Multi-Material BC recently began providing funding to the CVRD to support the curbside recycling collection program.
Jason Adair, the CVRD’s solid waste operations superintendent believes now is an “opportune time” for residents to consider adding garbage and organics collection to their curbside services.
A 2015 waste composition study found that in the 13,000 homes in CVRD electoral areas where organics are not collected at the curbside, compostable food waste material made up 36 per cent of the total garbage.
“The CVRD currently ships 19,000 tonnes of garbage annually to a landfill in the United States. The introduction of organics pick-up would divert up to 1,300 tonnes of waste from the landfill and reduce the amount of landfill-produced methane,” Adair said. “It would also give us the opportunity to turn that food waste into compost locally and stop it from making the long journey to Washington State.”
The surveys will be conducted one electoral area at a time beginning with Area H.
After the survey has been conducted, an open house event will be held in each area to provide residents with an opportunity to discuss their curbside collection program and the proposed changes.
New programs could be launched as early as 2016.
Visit cvrd.bc.ca/survey to learn more about the survey and options.
