Schedules for garbage, green bin and recycling pick-up may soon change.
With waste collection service contracts expiring in 2012, the City of Ottawa is re-examining its Yellow Bag program for small businesses, which has attracted relatively few shop owners since it was launched five years ago as a way to divert more garbage from landfills.
The small-scale commercial waste pickup program is among the issues being discussed during a series of public consultations now being held throughout the city.
A controversial plan to reduce residential garbage pickup from weekly to every two weeks has been the chief subject of debate, but issues related to commercial waste are also on the table.
When the municipality stopped non-residential trash collection in 2004, businesses were forced to find private contractors to take out the trash – and it hasn’t been cheap.
The cost of private waste collection for Kevin Houlahan, owner of Hair Essentials Inc. on Bank Street, has more than quadrupled since he signed his first contract in 2004, he says.
The Yellow Bag program began in 2006 as a way for the city to provide a less expensive, alternative waste collection option for small businesses, such as Hair Essentials, that produce an amount of waste similar to most homes.
To be eligible for the program, businesses must not exceed eight yellow bags of waste and 15 containers of recyclable material per pick-up period.
The idea of the yellow bags was to promote waste diversion through recycling.
“The more small businesses we have involved, the less waste we’ll have going to the landfills,” city spokeswoman Jocelyne Turner says of the Yellow Bag program.
Businesses on private contracts have to pay an additional fee in order to recycle. The extra costs for businesses means that they end up throwing their recyclables out along with their garbage, explains Houlahan. He doesn’t want to do either, so he’s forced to take his recycling home with him.
“I think that’s the biggest issue,” says Lori Mellor, executive director of the Preston Street BIA. “It’s an extra cost for them and when you’re a small business like that, every penny counts.”
Mellor doesn’t know of any businesses in her BIA that take advantage of the Yellow Bag program. Businesses in the Preston Street BIA had already signed contracts with private waste collection companies by the time the Yellow Bag program was rolled out.
In fact, there are only 306 businesses in all of Ottawa that take advantage of the city’s Yellow Bag program, according to the city.
Businesses can purchase the yellow bags for $3.25 each, but there are only 11 Home Hardware stores in Ottawa that sell the bags and none of them are located in the Centretown area.
Most of the businesses are too big and the smaller businesses that are eligible don’t want to pay extra for the yellow bags when they can just bring the bags home and put them on their curbside, where garbage is collected.