The following letter was sent to SCRD Halfmoon Bay director Garry Nohr and copied to Coast Reporter.
Dear Garry:
I did my homework and thought I was reasonably well prepared to respond if asked to participate in the telephone survey about recycling options. How wrong I was. The design of the survey made it virtually impossible to give a considered answer regarding preferencesbetween the three options loosely described as take it yourself, curb-side pick-up, and enhanced curb-side pick-up.
I am content with the present system. For more than 30 years our household has taken advantage of whatever recycling facilities have been available. Currently, I sort all our paper, cardboard, glass, cans and plastic, and take them to the Sechelt recycling depot on a regular basis. This is not a problem for me, but I appreciate that it may be for others and that introduction of door-to-door pick-up would therefore increase the amount of recyclables diverted from the landfill. I am therefore ready to give qualified support to the principle of curb-side pick-up. However, I am opposed to single-stream recycling as I suspect that cross-contaminated material has much reduced value, and, if it can't be sold on, will end up in a landfill anyway, perhaps ours or perhaps somewhere else.Accordingly, mysupport for curb-side pick is heavily dependent on it being a multi-stream system. The survey questions offered no opportunity to make this preference clear.
Some of the pros and cons of single-stream versus multi-stream collection are summarized in the pamphlet published by the Sunshine Coast Regional District, but no figures are offered regarding comparative costs. How can anyone express a preference for one over the other without this critical information? I might possibly change my mind about multi-stream collection if I had a better idea of how much it would cost.
John Newell
Halfmoon Bay
