The recycling program in Prince George had a good first year, according to the organization behind the city's curbside collection, but the city hasn't seen a serious decline in garbage going to the landfill.
"Curbside (collection) continues to get better, we see more containers set out and people are slowly getting onto how to sort their bins properly," said Allen Langdon, managing director of Multi-Material B.C. (MMBC).
Residential pick-up of recycling began for single-family homes at the beginning of September 2014. MMBC is the stewardship group representing producers of packaging and printed paper, who the provincial government mandated as responsible for collecting the materials put into the marketplace as of last May.
After both the city and the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George turned down the scheme to run the recycling program themselves, MMBC contracted Emterra Environmental to operate the pick up service.
According to Langdon, about 60 per cent of homes that received the blue bins are participating in the bi-weekly collection.
"We've been kind of at that level for a little bit and I expect that we'll continue to see that push up incrementally as we go forward," he said.
Time will be the biggest factor in raising that number, said Langdon, but MMBC is continuing a variety of promotional and educational activities, including the representatives it had at the BCNE this year and the Recycle It Right app it also released.
As of April, multi-family homes were also eligible to participate in the recycling program, which collected 722 tonnes of material within the city in its first seven-and-a-half months of operation.
Bins brought to the city for use during the Canada Winter Games were made available to property owners/managers in the spring.
About half of the eligible buildings, representing about 2,000 units, have joined in, said Langdon.
"Having 50 per cent of multi-family (buildings) come on stream is great," Langdon said. "Of course we'd be happy if more buildings said they'd like the service."
The city is still tracking the results of curbside recycling on their own solid waste operations.
While there is some reduction to the amount of garbage getting sent to the landfill, it's not as much as they thought, said city manager Kathleen Soltis.
That may partially be due to residents replacing the recyclables removed from their bins with other material, such as grass clippings, she said.
"The other thing that we're finding is that the recycling, at least in terms of the plastics, is lighter - so they took room before in the garbage cans but didn't take a lot of weight," said Soltis.
"So the weight isn't going down as much as we would have hoped."
