City of Regina checking blue bins, wants better recycling

Regina residents might see people looking through their blue recycling bins over the next month and a half, as the City of Regina sends out its CartSmart inspectors.

From next week to about the end of October, city workers will go out into communities and look at what people are putting in their blue bins.

Pat Wilson, the city’s director of water, waste, and environmental services, said it’s an education program to get people to put less waste that can’t be recycled into their blue bins.

“We do find most people are trying to put the right things in the cart so we really want to start by focusing on making sure people know what they should and shouldn’t be putting in that cart and finding out what those barriers are to doing it the right way,” Wilson said Friday.

Wilson explained that city officials are seeing some confusion from people about what can be recycled in Regina’s program — things like flimsy plastic bags can’t be recycled, but mostly clean pizza boxes can be.

The city isn’t looking at fines for something like that right now, though Wilson didn’t rule it out for the future of the program.

Regina has had a recycling program since 2013, and in the first few years of the program, Wilson said the city saw improvements in how much waste was put in the recycling bins.

But, over the last couple years, Wilson said the amount of garbage in the blue bins has stayed steady around 10 or 11 per cent, so the city is doing this education campaign to try to improve that number.

Wilson said having garbage mixed in with recycling just makes the program more expensive.

“Those things that need to go to the landfill are picked up in a different system, so we have to collect them all and then move them to another facility …,” Wilson said.

“That’s just an extra step before it actually gets to the landfill so it just increases the overall cost. The more we can get clean recycling or the right things to the right place, the easier the recycling process happens.”

The city will be inspecting blue bins for waste that can’t be recycled and tagging them, letting homeowners know what they can do better. Sept. 13, 2019 (Lisa Schick/980 CJME)

Workers will look at about 2,800 locations in the city in small groups in the program. Wilson said they’ll open the lid of the bin and look at what they can see — they won’t be rifling through people’s bins.

Once they’re done, the worker will put one of three tags on the bin. There’s a “good job” tag which lets the homeowner know that they’re sorting out recycling and waste properly, and there are two “oops” tags — one that lets the homeowner know what they’re doing wrong, and another that warns the homeowner that they’re putting hazardous waste in their recycling like batteries or aerosol cans, and it won’t be picked up.