Councillors considering charging Calgarians less in monthly waste and recycling
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Calgarians could see a drop in their monthly recycling fees, as Alberta looks to put the onus on companies rather than consumers.
On Thursday, city council's community development committee will discuss transitioning to Alberta's new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program.
The program, which will be fully implemented in April, is intended to shift the physical and financial responsibility of recycling products to the companies behind those products in a bid to producers to recycle more materials and create less packaging waste.
In turn, the committee will discuss cutting Calgarians' monthly Blue Cart Program charge down from $9.34 this year to $2.17.
The result would save each Calgarian who pays that fee more than $86 per year.
Ward 14 Coun. Peter Demong has been researching and advocating for EPR for nearly eight years. In 2019, he pushed council to vote to support a province-wide study of the issue and worked with other municipalities around Alberta to bring that research to the provincial government, touting its environmental and financial benefits.
Demong said that if someone told him when he was first elected to council in 2010 that he was going to be so passionate about recycling, he'd have laughed.
But he said reading reports about hundreds of thousands tonnes of waste being buried moved him to act.
"You know it can go to a better, higher purpose, that you can save your constituents money, that you can improve the environment and the economy at the same time," Demong said.
"It just suddenly becomes a no-brainer that somebody needs to champion this and get it across the finish line."
He added that city councillors are often hearing about how every user fee residents pay is too high and bringing the blue bin fee down is one way council can respond.
"It's going to benefit Calgarians mostly by their pocketbook," Demong said.
"Studies have [also] shown significantly higher recycling rates, higher volunteerism rates to actually do the recycling, it's better for the environment, less goes into the landfill, [and] it encourages the producers to change their product mix so that paper packaging products are more easily recyclable and more easily identifiable as recyclable."
EPR hands the responsibility and cost of recycling to producers for packaging and paper products, and hazardous and special products like batteries, pesticides, and products that are flammable, corrosive or toxic.
Ward 8 Coun. Courtney Walcott, the chair of the community development committee, says the motion is likely to pass. The initiative is all about ensuring the right person pays for the responsibility of recycling, he told reporters on Tuesday.
"[In] most of Alberta, most of the country, the cost of doing business like this gets slowly filtered down to the taxpayer," Walcott said.
"This is one of the programs that actually makes sure whoever's doing the pollution, in this case with plastic packaging and recyclable packaging, is the one who's paying for it or reducing it. Both of those are good for citizens."
The EPR program will also create a consistent list of materials that can be recycled across Alberta in an attempt to make the system more straightforward.
The new program also means recycling regulation and oversight will move from city council to the province.
After being discussed by committee on Thursday, transitioning to EPR will go to a city council meeting later in February to prepare for the province's implementation in April.
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