Heading into the dog days of summer, the Thompson Recycling Centre installed some upgraded equipment that will hopefully make life a little bit easier for its employees.
According to manager Billie-Jo Thompson, they recently purchased new components for their recycling baler which cost anywhere from $125,000 to $135,000.
“We did that because we knew our [old machine] was getting to the end of its life and if the baler was to break down, and we were needing to replace it, it could take several weeks or months. So, in anticipation, of that we scheduled a shut down.”
While this new piece of equipment creates bales of recyclable material at roughly the same speed as the old model, Thompson said this updated baler runs on a more streamlined computerized system as opposed to a mechanical one.
Even though the City of Thompson is cutting the Recycling Centre’s funding by $80,000 in its 2018−19 budget, Thompson mentioned that these cutbacks didn’t factor into this recent purchase.
“The funds that were used to purchase this baler were funds that have been saved up and put into a separate account over the past few years,” she said. “So this money is set aside. It doesn’t have any impact on our 2018 budget.”
Moving forward, Thompson admitted that the Recycling Centre will have to take certain measures to accommodate for this upcoming downturn in funding.
“The cost to process some of our commodities like our comingled [recycling] has increased. Shipping costs have increased, so we’ll move to different models,” she said. “What we’ll be doing is pulling out different products and separating more so we have less co-mingled [recycling] to ship, thus not paying so much to have that processed.”
However, the more pressing issue that the Recycling Centre is dealing with right now is the rates of contamination, which currently hovers around 16 per cent.
Even though Thompson maintains that recycling rates are still on the rise in the Hub of the North, she revealed that local residents still have a lot of bad habits to shake, which become even more noticeable in the summer time when items like food, animal waste and baby diapers are left to cook in the hot sun.
“Some people will gut their fish and unfortunately they’re throw all of that stuff in their recycling bin and it only takes one person to do that to contaminate a whole truck,” she said. “In the winter we get a lot of contamination, but, at the same time, a lot of it’s frozen, so we don’t .... get the mice, the hornets, the wasps, the maggots, all of those things, because they’re frozen. But in the summer it’s different story.”
For more information on proper recycling procedure, please visit the Thompson Recycling Centre’s official website or Facebook page.
