City moving back to weekly recycling pickup

The City of Brandon is moving back to weekly recycling collection next month — but will revisit the frequency of pickups during next year’s budget deliberations.

The change, which starts the week of Nov. 10, reverses the current schedule that sees recycling bins picked up every other week.

Coun. Shawn Berry (Ward 7) made the motion to go to weekly pickup and council passed it at Monday evening’s council meeting.

“It’s sad to see that we’ve come to the point where we’ve had to reduce the service or pickup from weekly to biweekly,” Berry said about the pickup schedule over the summer.

Council voted in April to reduce the service, citing the amount of blue-bin pickups the city does. The city administration recommendation said a majority of pickups were half or less than half full.

The inefficiency caused strain on the city’s equipment, as more pickups were performed than necessary. It also caused more overtime work at the landfill, the council report from April stated.

The city changed to biweekly collection in June.

On Monday, Berry said his household of two doesn’t fill their bin every week, and he only placed his bin at the curb every three weeks or so.

“This isn’t about me and our household — this is about the residents we represent, the ones that elect us here,” he said. “There’s a lot of families that rely on recycling, that fill that blue bin every single week.”

With pickup being limited, many people are throwing excess recycling into their garbage bins, defeating the purpose of the recycling bins in the first place, he said, adding that the most common complaint he heard over the summer was the biweekly pickup schedule.

He urged council to go back to weekly pickup for good.

Coun. Glen Parker (Ward 9) said he would vote in favour of Berry’s motion, although he is “totally in favour of biweekly collection.”

Parker, who is also the deputy mayor, said council should explore other options, like increasing the size of bins, as a more permanent solution.

Coun. Kris Desjarlais (Ward 2) had a similar opinion.

He suggested more education around what can be recycled and “to help residents understand it was a significant drain on our fleet, maintenance and repair on those trucks.”

He said potentially adding a second blue bin for some residents is also an option.

“We were given good reasons and good rationale as to why we were shifting to biweekly (in April),” he said.

Part of the reason for the added strain on the city’s services is the success of the organic green bins.

“It’s great that we’re one of the best composting communities in Canada,” Desjarlais said. “But we didn’t expect as many green bins being picked up, so there was a huge strain on our trucks.”

According to the city, just over a fifth of all recycled material collected is sent to the landfill because of contamination.

The city was already planning to move to weekly pickup for recycling over the holiday season. Green-bin collection ends for the season on Nov. 7 and black-bin garbage collection remains unchanged.

» alambert@brandonsun.com