With no recycling service in Fort Frances for a second week, the town’s manager of operations and facilities is continuing to follow leads, including if the town can buy a “Blue Box” truck from the now-defunct Northwest Ontario Recycle Association.
“It’s a starting point. It may fit in with a couple options we’re looking at,” Pat Hickerson said after Monday night’s regular council meeting.
“It’s a move forward. We have to find out how we can refine and fine-tune any system of pickups we might put in place,” he noted. “And it’s not at a high cost.”
Two options currently on the table are a partnership with Koochiching County or going back to Dryden, which has a bid in for the processing plant there.
Hickerson said it’s possible the town simply could take care of its own curbside pickup and then drive loads to Dryden to be processed.
Detail, such as how much such a truck would cost, weren’t available at press time, but Hickerson noted the town should know sometime this week.
“We want something up and running as soon as possible,” he stressed.
Meanwhile, council referred a proposal from former NORA chair Mel Fisher to the operations and facilities executive committee.
“People want to recycle—their common sense tells them it is wrong to stack usable materials in the ground for future generations to finally dispose of,” Fisher, also a former Dryden city councillor, wrote in a letter to council.
“NORA provided a very high level of service, collecting and recycling a broader range of materials than most programs, and on an apples-to-apples comparison basis, was among one of the lower cost programs in the province,” he added.
“Our method of billing municipalities was not the best, and created the mistaken impression that the program was much more expensive than others,” remarked Fisher.
“[But] the latest tender figures indicate that, in the absence of NORA, we will all be paying about twice as much money for a much-reduced service,” he warned.
“There could not be more graphic evidence of the advantage of working together rather than separately.”
Fisher disputes the judgment that “Humpty Dumpty is broken and can’t be put back together.”
As such, he’s asking all municipalities to come together for a meeting to discuss how the region once again can work together to deliver recycling services—perhaps with an outside party like Ben Bennett, chair of the Association of Municipal Recycling Co-ordinators.