Mountain View County council has instructed the CAO to meet with administrators in Sundre, Olds, Didsbury, Carstairs and Cremona to address concerns with litter and other debris at recycling centre stations in the communities.
The instruction came by way of motion during council's recent regularly scheduled council meeting.
Reeve Bruce Beattie says there has been numerous concerns voiced by residents concerned with overflowing bins and debris scattered around the sites.
"We are getting a lot of complaints about the bins being full and a bit of disorganization at them and inconsistency between the transfer sites and the recycling depot," said Beattie.
"It's an ongoing issue. It has been raised a number of times and I guess we are trying to bring it to another level to see if the CAOs can deal with it."
The Mountain View Regional Waste Management Commission has been working with the municipalities to try to address unauthorized commercial use of the sites, which are for residential use only.
The commission's recycling centres are located in Olds, Sundre, Carstairs, Cremona, at the Didsbury landfill, Eagle Hill, Water Valley and Midway.
The commission hires a contractor who collects recycled goods from the centres and delivers them to the Olds Transfer Site for handling, sorting, baling and shipping of recycled materials.
Responding to complaints from several member municipalities that the recycling centre bins were becoming overfilled, the commission recently investigated and found that commercial users were causing the problem, said commission CAO Pat Sliworsky.
"Basically what was happening is the commercial users are taking their recycling over to recycling depots (centres) that were set up originally for residential users only," Sliworsky told the Gazette.
"So the issue there is they are filling up these bins quite quickly because of the amount of recycling that they've got. As much as we don't want to discourage commercial companies from recycling, the recycling depots are basically set up by the taxpayers, who are the residential people who are paying for it."
The recycling centres accept mixed plastics, cardboard and boxboard, newspaper, mixed paper, food (tin) cans, and clear glass.
In response to the concerns with commercial dumping, the commission recently sent letters to member municipalities.
The letters stated, in part, that. "If commercial users are allowed to continue to use these recycling depots for the disposal of their recycling and other waste it will add more tipping fees and more cost to cleaning up of unwanted waste at these sites.
"This fee will be shown as an increase to the fees to operate recycling-diversion that each municipality is paying today. As the commission has no control over commercial companies in the member area, the concern has been passed to each municipality."
