WATCH: City staff are recommending upgrades to Kingston’s sorting plant to allow pickup of both blue and grey recycling bins each week.
City staff are recommending that the City of Kingston move to a dual-stream curbside recycling model that would see blue and grey boxes collected at the same time each week.
Currently, the pickup of blue and grey recycling bins alternates, with one type of recycling being picked up each week, and the city’s infrastructure is designed to operate on a four-stream collection model.
This means that when you put out your recycling, for example, cardboard is separated from paper and other materials. The same goes for your glass and plastic.
A dual-stream recycling system would allow residents to put out both grey and blue boxes at the same time every week.
“The processing facility is really the piece of the system that dictates how we collect the recyclables,” said Heather Roberts, director of solid waste services for the City of Kingston.
And that is the big-ticket item that a city staff report will recommend to the environment, infrastructure and transportation policies committee on Wednesday: a $2-million upgrade to the sorting facility on Lappan’s Lane, along with an added $100,000 operating cost per year.
“What we want to do is retrofit the (material recovery facility) and convert it (from) a four-stream material recovery facility processing plant to a two-stream, where we could be able to collect glass with all of the other containers and we could be able to collect cardboard with all of the other grey-box materials,” explained Roberts.
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The investment is worth it for the city if the change gets Kingston closer to its goal of diverting household waste away from the landfill.
“The city does have a goal of diverting 65 per cent of its waste from landfill by 2025,” said Roberts.
If given the green light by council, residents could start putting out their blue and grey boxes at the same time as of July 2021.