Simcoe County residents are doing a garbage job with their trash.
According to the results of a recent waste audit and organics capture, residents are not getting the message about the importance of using their green bins, according to staff.
Despite ongoing efforts to educate the public through various campaigns, the county has seen a stall in diversion rates, Rob Elliott, general manager of engineering, planning and environment, noted during Tuesday’s committee of the whole meeting.
In 2024, council had considered using a policy approach. The idea of not picking up garbage bins if a green bin was not also at the curb was even bounced around.
However, staff were directed to go back and look at more of a public relations campaign in an effort to get more people on board, Elliott said prior to a presentation that featured those findings and addressed possible “next steps.”
Separating organics from waste and recycling has a significant environmental benefit, explained Laura Barrett, manager of collections for the county.
“There are a lot of negative impacts with respect to putting your organics into your garbage carts, including that it takes up landfill space,” she said. “As you’re aware, our landfills are closing. We closed Collingwood last year. We are closing Nottawasaga this year, and in 2027 we will be closing Oro.”
Over the course of 2024, solid waste management staff completed eight weeks of waste audits for a two-week cycle each season — with 400 households audited in total. Those audits showed only 24.2 per cent of the garbage carts’ contents were actually garbage (by weight). Organics, Barrett noted, made up the largest category in garbage at 46.4 per cent, nearly double the weight of actual garbage.
Results from the audit also showed 24 per cent of residents did not use their organics carts over a four-week period, while larger audits showed 32 per cent of households did not participate in organics diversion on any one week.
The results of the increased efforts to promote the green bin organics program have not increased the organics capture rate, said Rob McCullough, the county’s director of solid waste management.
“We are doing a great job with recycling, but we can do a better job with organics in the garbage,” he said. “Everybody can do a better job, but those residents that don’t use their organic cart produce 75 per cent more garbage than those who do. Despite all the work that’s been done to promote it … we are actually losing a little bit of ground.”
Currently, the county is sending approximately 43,000 tonnes of garbage to landfills. If every resident had done a perfect job of sorting out their organics — which McCullough acknowledged will never happen — that could have been reduced to 12,000 tonnes and resulted in a savings of $250,000.
“We will never get to it, but it’s aspirational,” he said.
Given that education and promotion seem to not be hitting their mark, staff are looking at launching a pilot program that would include targeted promotion and education just to those households that are not participating at all.
“To do that, we need an exact address, and to do that in a cost-effective way, we have to employ technology,” he said, adding staff are looking for council’s consent to procure technology on a pilot basis that would be able to assess organics participation at a household level.
“We know that is going to be quite expensive, and (we) expect to come back to council with that request in the late spring. Before then, we want to run a request for proposals process to identify what the technology would be, how much it would be to run as a pilot and how much it would be to use within the entire county.”
The pilot would evaluate whether any of these more direct methods of communication make an impact on organics capture, added McCullough.
Such a program won’t be cheap, but neither is running out of landfill space and having to ship garbage elsewhere, acknowledged Midland Mayor Bill Gordon.
“I see it as part of the solution, even though it feels moderately invasive — and I know we’ve felt that way in the past — but at some point, the garbage has got to go somewhere,” he said.
Springwater Mayor Jennifer Coughlin, who participated in last year’s audit, said she was “disgusted” by the whole experience, not only from the smell of the waste and what was being pulled out of the bags but also by what she called the “complacency, laziness and neglect” of residents.
“I don’t think that policing or penalizing those that aren’t doing it is necessarily the approach,” she said. “The messaging that goes out to our residents … is always happy. What we have before us, the real issue (and the) seriousness of the scary truth, is that we don’t have capacity. We have to divert this or there will be another landfill, and no one wants that in their backyard.”
Council ultimately granted initial approval for staff to start a procurement process to get quotes on possible technology, but that vote is still required to be ratified at the next regular council meeting on March 11.