Three county waste programs have been postponed until further notice due to COVID-19 concerns.
Compost sales, clothing and bulky collection programs are all on pause right now while the County of Simcoe grapples with the realities of COVID-19, trying to maintain physical distancing for staff and some contractors being deemed non-essential services.
For bulky item collection, which typically commences as of June 1, with current emergency orders in place it’s not responsible for the county to be sending two people out together to provide the service at this time, says Rob McCullough, the county's director of solid waste management.
“Having two people in a truck is not a good idea at this time. You can’t physically distance six feet being in the same vehicle,” said McCullough. “You need two people to lift those heavy items onto a truck, and we can’t do that right now. As restrictions lift, we’ll keep reviewing to see what we can do.”
The clothing collection program is being postponed as the processor that manages collected textiles – Canadian Clothing International – has been deemed a non-essential business by the province and is closed temporarily.
“We don’t have the storage capacity ourselves,” McCullough said.
Miller Waste Services, the collector, also requires county staff assistance in offloading the collected clothing, which cannot be achieved in accordance with physical-distancing requirements.
While textiles were planned to be collected the weeks of June 15 and 22, now county staff has held initial discussions with both the processor and Miller Waste regarding potentially rescheduling clothing collection to September, assuming the pandemic has resolved by that time.
Typically, residential compost sales occur at local landfill sites in mid-May for three to four weeks, followed by commercial sales well into June.
“We want to free up the landfill sites for the urgent and emergent disposal needs of our residents and businesses, and we’re already having huge line ups,” said McCullough. “If we added to that... it would make it that much more difficult to do our prime business, which is accepting those wastes from the public.”
Typically, when residents come to the landfill to pick up compost for sale, they back their vehicle up to a pile and shovel it themselves.
“We also couldn’t come up with a way for customers to safely distance from each other while doing that, so it’s a combination of those two thing,” he said.
Residential compost sales are now postponed until the fall.
As all three programs are either done on a cost-recovery basis or are merely being postponed, there is no expected additional financial impacts to the taypayer.
For more information on Simcoe County waste collection, click here.
