The closure of the Sundre Recycle Centre is a done deal.
Last week, the local council stood firm in its decision to cease operating the facility as of Dec. 31 following Mountain View County's request to extend that deadline in light of a change in contractor and improved cleanliness at the site, located in Sundre’s southeast near the soccer fields.
The intent was to allow additional time to help “better identify the future viability” of the centre, states a letter signed by the county’s chief administrative officer, Jeff Holmes.
But the Sundre council was not willing to budge.
And, arguably, for good reasons.
Don’t get me wrong — I think there should be a recycling service for town and county residents. The municipality’s blue bin program is great, but does not take no-deposit glass containers. And sometimes, large boxes, even when broken down, simply won’t fit.
That means people will now have to squeeze their recycling into a narrow schedule at the transfer site east of town, which is only open Fridays and Saturdays, but at least has staff on hand to monitor and offer help.
However, that will unfortunately very likely dissuade some people. To encourage a majority of people to recycle, the process must be made as simple as possible. Each additional hurdle just makes it more likely that recyclable materials will end up thrown out in the garbage, or worse, ditched randomly or burned.
But the problem at the Sundre Recycle Centre was not just how messy the site would become at times.
The heart of the issue actually stemmed from improperly disposed waste items, such as used oils and non-recyclable refuse contaminating and spoiling entire loads of recyclables that ended up going to landfill. In other words, the hard work of many who carefully sorted their items was made a pointless, wasted effort by the carelessness of a few.
In that sense, Sundre’s council was not wrong to assert that a change in contractor would not necessarily suddenly spur the minority, who were either inadvertently misusing or outright deliberately abusing the unsupervised site, to get their act together.
Because the key word there is unsupervised. So long as the recycle centre was unmanned, the potential for a few people to spoil entire loads remained.
Council was basically stuck between a rock and a hard place — either leave the site open and continue to deal with contaminated loads, or shut it down and run the risk of waste ending up in the ditches. I don’t believe that decision was made lightly.
What will be interesting to see is how county officials respond to the local council’s suggestion to relocate and monitor the centre on county-owned land in the industrial area immediately west of Sundre.
