This letter resulted from a couple of items brought up lately in your publication, regarding waste disposal in Mountain View County, one being a letter regarding inappropriate disposal of recyclables, the other being the closure of the Sundre recycling site.
It's easy and convenient to blame the users, but waste disposal in the county has been disaster since it was revamped into the recycling era, years ago.
County residents pay exorbitant rates for poor service and the standards of what goes where keeps changing. Residents of adjoining municipalities enjoy free disposal, in fact they post staff to screen out Mountain View residents looking for a freebie.
Poor or over expensive service just creates those piles of rubbish we find at the sides of our roads on occasion. I remember writing a letter some years ago, suggesting the Olds transfer station was a dangerous fire hazard to the town, due to an accumulation of flammable material. That issue was going to be dealt with by a change of management. It certainly was. The Olds transfer site is now closed and condemned. Can't blame the users for that.
Funny how we've been indoctrinated into Recycle psychology with rosy visions of the stuff we deposit today coming back as wonder products that will save the planet. Turns out, we've just been selling the stuff to China and letting them worry about it. Apparently, they've had enough and said No More. The old story of not dealing with a problem, just moving it out of sight. This has created a bottleneck and the only solution is to landfill it, the bad old way.
As for the Sundre situation, as a frequent user, I have yet to find the bins not stuffed to capacity and the latest twist on recycling was one stream, don't worry about what goes where, we'll sort it out. I suggest the problem with the Sundre site is not users, but poor management and operation .
To complicate matters, the Sundre transfer station is open only two days a week, granted, an improvement over the previous one and a half days, but not nearly enough, given the size of the area it serves. Shame on the Town of Sundre for blaming people with no other option; seems to be a common trait on their behalf.
What needs to happen is a complete re-evaluation of the waste disposal process, not the frequent replacement of operators and managers, each one of whom was supposed to make things right, but just seems to screw it up more.
Hans C. Ullmann,
Olds
