This past week marked the first ever curb-side garbage and recycle pickup in Lac La Biche County by Sherwood Park-company Ever Green Ecological Services. After much debate about the size of the bins and the list of rules to follow, residents rolled their bins to the end of their driveways on Tuesday, in hopes the garbage would be collected without so much as a hiccup. And for the most part, that is exactly what happened.
“The first pick-up went really well, most residents really seemed to get it,” said Lorenzo Donini, a part-owner of Ever Green. “Usually it takes a few weeks for a community to really grasp what they can or can’t do, but we were really happy with how it went on Tuesday and Thursday.”
A few residents, however, had to deal with the dreaded ‘yellow sticky note’, explaining what rule was broken and why their garbage was not picked up. A few examples of behaviour that warrants a sticky note are: leaving the bin on the lawn, using a different container for extra garbage and wheels not facing the curb.
“People should definitely not take these sticky notes personally,” Donini said. “We are just trying to communicate right from the start the proper procedure for garbage collection, and we feel that the sticky note does a great job of that.”
For the first pickup, Ever Green used a modified truck that allows for manual garbage pickup as a way to give residents a bit of leeway. The company usually uses this truck for a few weeks until the community get in the habit of the expectations of Ever Green’s garbage collection. The company will then transition into an automatic truck that allows the driver to control a robotic arm to pick up the garbage without the driver leaving the cab of the truck.
“Lac La Biche did so well this past week, we believe that we’ll be able to transition into the regular automatic pickup trucks as early as this week,” Donini said.
Ever Green was also impressed with the first recycle pickup on Thursday noting that residents did a great job separating garbage from recycling and didn’t try to get away with mixing their garbage in the recycling bins.
“Unfortunately we did have to turn away a big bag of acorns in one of the recycling bins,” Donini said. “That is in fact not recyclable, and can be composted instead.”
