Recycling centre: unhealthy for the neighbourhood?
Tuesday we saw a report on how unhealthy it is for workers in the city’s recycling facility, where bacteria breed in the organic remnants in the materials they are sorting.
Wednesday, Frantz Benjamin, MNA for the district, says he’s concerned the facility may be unhealthy for people nearby as well, and he wants tests made of the air quality around the place.
There’s a certain irony here, because the facility is located at Papineau and the Met, where the air quality is never going to be exactly stellar. But if you add bacterial contamination on top of car exhaust, you might well end up with a nasty soup. Tests should be made.
And if it’s bad? Maybe it’s time we separated our recycling, as people do in Europe. No reason paper, glass and metal should all be put out together. Maybe there should also be a campaign to get people to wash and rinse jars, bottles and cans before putting them out.
Ian 10:14 on 2019-07-31 Permalink
Even in Ontario you are expected to separate your recycling, and wash it out. In Toronto you face fines if you don’t.
Thing is, I see the recycling trucks on my street every week and they are just dumping the bags together in a regular compactor style garbage truck. I am pretty sure almost none of that is being recycled. When I worked on a recycling truck in Hamilton, Ontario, our trucks had separate compartments – only paper waste had a compactor.
I called 311 last week because on my street the truck went over a speed bump too fast and spilled an insane amount of broken glass, enough to go from one edge of the street to the other – my street has 2 bike paths, parking, and a single lane for driving – that’s a lot of glass. If the glass is that crushed up, nobody is going to be sorting through it just wearing latex gloves as in the photo accompanying the first story there. Worker’s comp wouldn’t allow it even in a non-union facility.
Ian 10:22 on 2019-07-31 Permalink
…also worth noting, when I worked on a recycling truck, we had a broom, dustpan, and pail on each truck – if you spilled anything you were expected to stop and go clean it up, unlike garbage and recycling workers here who are total cowboys and leave garbage everywhere in their wake.
EmilyG 10:27 on 2019-07-31 Permalink
I seem to remember that recycling used to be required to be separated here in Montreal (or at least the Pierrefonds area?) This would’ve been around 1993 or so when the program was implemented and we had the little blue boxes.
Kate 10:44 on 2019-07-31 Permalink
When the green plastic boxes first came in, in the Plateau, they had a divider. Paper went in one side, metal and glass on the other. But that was phased out ages ago. I still have the box and the loose divider somewhere.
Michael Black 10:58 on 2019-07-31 Permalink
Outremont had door to door newspaper collection about 1978, and Westmount followed shortly after. As I recall someone like Tooker Gomberg took the initiative, so there was some distance from municipal services, but I can’t remember how much. Both initiatives counted on selling the newspapers to pay for truck rental and gas, and likely paying people to ride the trucks.
I can’t remember when Westmount morphed into collecting more than newspapers,but likely when Montreal did, providing the infrastructure to deal with the other items.
As I’ve said, Montreal started with those green bells in neighborhoods, you were expected to carry your recyc!ing to those, with sparate bells for newspapers, cans and bottles.
Then door to door recycling began, I can’t remember if the bells showed that people were ready for recycling, or people demanded a simpler process.
Certainly in Westmount you were supposed to separate things, and you were xpected to tie newspapers in bundles. That was the case when just newspaper was collected, and even after cans and bottles were added.
At some point, you could recycle glossy paper, and they announced you didn’t need to separate things, but I can’t remember exact timeline.
Michael
walkerp 09:46 on 2019-08-01 Permalink
Don’t even get me started. I suspect a big part of it is organized crime, but garbage collection here (and in the east coast in general) is just barbaric. The way it should work is that each household or buliding gets a single bin for each type of waste product (paper, plastic, glass, organics and landfill, etc.) and the size of those bins depend on the size of the building. If you go over, the amount in the bin, you have to buy special bags at a significant cost. The exception here is organics, where the bags would be free.
The culture here at every level is still “the city should take it out of my sight and I shouldn’t have to do any work” and the third-world garbage operators have the same mentality “pick it up as fast as we can and get rid of it”. Things are slowly changing, but when you come back to Montreal from the west coast, frankly, it’s embarrassing to see how the city looks on garbage day (and for several days after as the detritus blows around and slowly gets cleaned up).