OLDS — As of Aug. 1, the recycling centre at 49th Avenue at 49th Street will be closed, the Town of Olds recently announced.
The recycling station featured large yellow bins where residents could drop off such things as paper, cardboard and cans. Yellow bins were recently withdrawn from the Westview Co-op parking lot.
The decision to close the 49th Street recycling centre does not affect the residential blue bin recycling program in Olds.
Residents are encouraged to continue placing recyclable materials in those bins for regularly scheduled pickup days.
Additional blue bins are available from the town for those who have excess recycling material.
If residents have bulk recycling, the town is requesting that they take that to the landfill near Didsbury.
The 49th Street facility closure is part of a decision by the Mountain View Regional Waste Management Commission (MVRWMC), which has looked after recycling centres, to close eight unmanned recycling stations across the county by the end of this month.
The commission is made up of representatives from area municipalities, including Mountain View County, the towns of Olds, Sundre, Didsbury, Carstairs, and the Village of Cremona.
"Given the unmanned nature of commission sites and the large distances between them, the costs and efficiency of the regional recycling program simply don’t make financial or logistical sense,” said the commission in a letter to member communities.
The commission named several reasons for the closures, primarily economical, with illegal dumping cited as the main problem:
• In Olds specifically, about 33 per cent of recycling ended up directly in the Didsbury-area landfill, due to contamination from users dumping garbage, electrical goods and household hazardous products that cannot be recycled.
• Due to the additional trucking required to transport contaminated loads from the sorting facility to the landfill, the annual operational cost of this facility amounts to approximately $1,759 per tonne of material.
Hauling directly to the landfill is only $97 per tonne, “making the economic viability of the recycle stations very difficult to justify,” the release said.
Town officials said the 49th Street facility "does not meet its intended objectives, despite the significant investment by taxpayers,” a news release issued by the town said.
Mountain View County Deputy Reeve Greg Harris is the commission’s chairman.
Earlier, he told the Albertan that closing the stations is expected to save commission members about $130,000 in 2023 and approximately $410,000 in 2024.
Harris said although the market for recycled items varies, basically they have virtually no value.
The commission’s recommendation to members was to close the unmonitored stations and have municipal residents utilize existing blue-bin services.
“This isn’t the direction we wanted to see this program go, but this isn’t just a town issue – it affects all communities in Mountain View County (region),” Scott Grieco, director of operation for the town of Olds said in the news release.
“We do, however, understand the economic difficulties faced by the waste commission and their decision to discontinue the program,” he added.
