CORNWALL, Ontario – The City of Cornwall is seeking input from residents for their update to their Waste Management Master Plan.
The City held an open house at the Benson Centre on Thursday, July 12, 2018 and invited residents to give their ideas on how waste management could be done better.
“We are looking for feedback as to what waste management services people want in 2019,” said Danielle Watson, the City of Cornwall’s Waste Management Supervisor.
She gave examples as to some of the feedback they are looking for which includes, if people would be comfortable with a limit on garbage bags, mandatory recycling, a special service for large garbage items like mattresses.
The open house also provided some useful and interesting information for residents interested in learning about their waste management services in Cornwall.
For instance, the City of Cornwall provides waste management services to 22, 000, which costs $120 per-household per-year.
Currently, recycling is not mandatory in the City of Cornwall. Of the homes that receive waste management services, 58 percent recycle every week, while 77 percent put out garbage.
Those numbers become a little starker when compared to provincial averages. The average Cornwall household sends 444kg of waste to the dump every year, while the provincial average is 385kg per-household. In terms of recycling the average Cornwall household recycles 31kg a year, while the provincial average is 112kg.
Watson said that she had already been receiving some feedback from the public.
“We’ve had a lot of positive feedback about the bag limit,” Watson said.
She explained that most households only put out two-to-three bags of garbage weekly, which is where they wanted to be. She said one reason to consider the bag limit, was that as of now, there remains only 15 years worth of space left at Cornwall’s landfill site.
For those interested in giving their own input for the update to the Waste Master Plan can email wm@cornwall.ca .
