The Town of Fort Frances…

The Town of Fort Frances currently operates a depot open to the public and provided its residents with curbside collection. Under the regulation the producer would only be required to provide curbside collection, however we are bound by a large amount of unorganized area that is populated. These residences are not captured in the Town’s population nor do we track those residents who utilize our depot, however the depot is heavily utilized even with curbside collection. The loss of the depot for our area would have a tremendous negative impact on the service we provide to the residents in the Town of Fort Frances and neighboring unorganized communities. Per the current regulation, the residents in the unorganized districts will not be able to receive service post transition as there is no provision to expand service to these areas but they are relying on neighboring municipalities for their recycle needs as well as, in many cases, their solid waste needs. This means that post transition there will be an influx in waste to our landfill site no longer able to be diverted.

The proposed date of transition for Fort Frances and many other municipalities in the southern portion of the Northwest is substantially different than that of the rest of the Northwest. Each community’s program is relatively small and in the provincial scope, insignificant. In addition to that the geographical distance between communities is large and the closest processing plant is located out of province, so hauling is a major stumbling block for recycle in the northwest. Further some smaller municipalities utilize services from the larger municipalities for some, if not all of their blue box program and transitioning them on separate years will cause an interruption in the provision of service. Having the northwest transition over two distinctly different years substantially weakens our position to negotiate favorably with prospective PRO’s. We have established a working group among the 5 largest Northwestern Ontario Municipalities to try to ensure our interests are covered through transition. All communities west of Thunder Bay need to transition in the same year.