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The annual Spring Clean-Up, conducted by the Town of Drumheller, may undergo some changes after a host of issues plagued this year’s garbage collection.
Tammi Nygaard, manager of Drumheller and District Solid Waste Management, was disappointed with how the cleanup went this year.
“We’ve got some problems. We need to sit down, debrief, and come up with some better suggestions for next year,” said Nygaard. “We had a lot of issues this year. In the last couple years, we were doing quite well getting the message out that things needed to be separated and sorted. People were doing a good job of that.”
The biggest problem faced by crews was residents were not sorting the items they put out.
“The problems we experience this year had to do with sorting and separating. The public were just piling things up into huge piles, so when the guys got there, it was a huge mess. It took a lot of time to sort things and collect it all,” said Nygaard.
Another problem faced by crews were scavengers. Though Nygaard felt it was good that residents were reusing some of the items, their methods left something to be desired.
“There were a lot of people going around and scavenging ahead of the trucks. There were some that even did it on the same day the trucks were going through and getting in the way. They (scavengers) would make a mess of the piles,” said Nygaard.
Crews also hauled away an excessive amount of demolition materials. In years past, crews only collected a half-tonne truck worth of demolition material.
Lastly, Nygaard felt not all of what was collected belonged to residents in Drumheller.
“The public are abusing it. We think some of the stuff was imported from outside of the community. The guys go to these houses every year and every year they have these huge piles. It doesn’t make any sense how a person can collect that much waste in just one year,” said Nygaard.
In the end, 202 overtime hours were accrued by staff, compared to the last two years where no overtime hours resulted from the cleanup. The cost, so far, has been estimated to be $119,000.
Now, the future of the cleanup is up for debate. The Town will work on modifying the program to make next year smoother and reduce costs.
At the Monday, May 27, meeting of the Committee of the Whole, Drumheller Town Council expressed a desire to keep the cleanup running, but felt crews could be more selective in what they take.
“Maybe it’s a matter of complacency. Continued complacency regarding sorting could result in the program getting scaled back to the point where it’s not the same as what people want,” said Councillor Jay Garbutt. “I think all would be in agreement to do away with anything that would be considered an abuse of the system, in particular setting limits on what the amounts and be and empowering (crews) to not pick up what they think is abuse.”
Overall, the amount of items collected was up 25 per cent over last year.
