Duane Hicks
Recycling depot upgrades are on the way later this month but in the meantime, the town is asking local residents to use common sense when dropping off at the bins at the Sixth Street West site.
This past weekend saw four large bins crammed to overflowing with items—some recyclable, some not—along with the hopper of a dump truck.
Unfortunately, it’s not that unusual.
“Every Monday morning we clean up,” noted Operations and Facilities manager Doug Brown.
Brown said the town provides biweekly curbside “blue box” pickup for it residents and urged the public to use that means to get rid of their recyclables.
“We pay a contractor to pick that stuff up at curbside every two weeks,” he remarked.
“You should put it out at curbside if you can.
“We want people to recycle but they’re going to have to take care,” added Brown.
Despite signage at the depot that clearly states what is and isn’t to be recycled, it’s common for some residents to dump off garbage there.
Unacceptable items have ranged from mattresses to plastic children’s toys to barbecues.
“People are getting a little too relaxed,” Brown said.
“Instead of going out to the dump, they’ll just drop it off there and that’s not the purpose of this,” he stressed.
“It costs us around $30 [a ton] to landfill where it’s about $400 to recycle a ton,” Brown noted.
“Help us out a bit,” he asked residents.
The bins were meant for local residents who were going out of town for a month and wouldn’t be able to put out their “blue box” on their given day.
When the bins and truck are full, they do not have to keep leaving their recyclables there, said Brown.
They can take them home and bring them back at another time.
Brown also is aware that some of the recyclables are dropped off by non-residents.
“Everybody wants to do their environmentally-friendly thing but use some common sense,” he reiterated.
“It’s costing the taxpayers of Fort Frances to pick that up every Monday morning.”
Meanwhile, the early stages of work for the upgrades there have been completed.
This will include the installation of two new stationary compactor units with properly-sized hoppers and four 40-cubic-yard roll-off containers.
These are supposed to be on-site the week of July 20 and will take a few days to install.
“Everything’s set up for the packer units to be installed,” Brown said.
“We’ve got the foundations, and we’ve got the power supply and the Internet connection.”
One of the stationary packers will be for the public the other will be for the truck that does “blue box” pickup.
Recyclables will be put into the packers. Town staff will activate the compactors when they start to get full—crushing down the contents and making room for more.
The compactors will be activated by Public Works staff on the weekdays, and airport staff after-hours and on weekends.
They will be activated remotely via wireless Internet connection.
Brown said the compactors are 20 feet long by seven feet wide and eight feet high. Each container holds roughly 10 tons.
Once two of the containers are full, the town will call a contractor to take them to a material recycling facility in Winnipeg.
The other two containers would remain here to be used.
Recyclables currently are shipped in walking floor trailers, which means the manpower and equipment (loader) used to load them, as well as emptying the four drop-off bins on a regular basis, will be free to do other maintenance tasks for the town, such as winter control activities or adjusting catch basins.
The new system will save money and mean fewer headaches, including no Monday morning clean-ups, said Brown.
“[Right now] we waste about an hour every Monday morning—we got a loader and three guys hand-bombing the material,” he noted.
“Hopefully we get away from all of that,” he added. “With these stationary packers, we won’t handle it anymore.
“The unit fills up, we keep packing it into these containers,” Brown explained.
“It squeezes it until we get 10 tons in there.”
All of this is expected to save the town $63,588 a year.
The total project cost is $218,275, with nearly half being paid for by the Stewardship Ontario Continuous Improvement Fund (CIF).
The town will pay for its portion using federal gas tax revenues it previously had received from the government.
