Garbage and waste
Most of what cleanup volunteers haul out of ditches and parks is single-use packaging from a handful of food-service chains. The fix is a to make these establishments pick up the cheque. Introduce a fee on commercial operators, and use it to mitigate the problem.
Where I stand
The Lorneville Earth Week pickup last week produced an inventory: cans, candy wrappers, “paper” cups, and a remarkable number of plastic cup lids, most of it from a handful of large food-service chains. The cup on the roadside is not a personality flaw of whoever last held it. It is the predictable end state of tableware designed to be discarded. Plastic lids fragment over a couple of years into pieces too small to ever pick up. The forever chemicals lining “paper” cups outlast all of us.
The headline municipal lever is a waste-management fee on the commercial operators whose packaging keeps showing up at our cleanups. Revenue restricted to use: more public bins, more frequent emptying, and direct support to community cleanups (bags, gloves, pickup). Polluter pays, with a tight connection between the fee and its use to keep it a fee and not a tax. Saint John’s public-bin density is far thinner than a city this litter-prone needs, and that is part of why litter keeps building up.
Beyond the fee, three more levers. Procurement standards: the city should prefer reusable, returnable, and lower-impact packaging in everything it buys. Active advocacy to the province for expanded deposit-return (coffee cups especially), and for extended producer responsibility on food-service packaging. Microplastics and PFAS are not problems Saint John can solve alone, but the city does not have to wait for either Ottawa or Fredericton to start.
On the residential side, some neighbourhoods are underserved by current pickup frequency, and the two-week schedule is sometimes blamed for illegal dumping. I am open to a weekly-pickup conversation but I want measurements first. Illegal dumping is a real problem. It is not yet clear how much of it is caused by the two-week schedule and how much by other factors. The density / pickup-frequency trade-off is real: in the city centre one truck stop serves four to sixteen households; in lower-density areas the same kilometres of road serve far fewer homes. Service frequency and density are linked for honest operational reasons, and any change has to start from data.
If lower frequency turns out to be a driver of dumping, an idea worth piloting is community garbage collection points for off-weeks: shared bins at designated sites, like community mailboxes. Canada Post went this direction for the same density-economics reason. And it works. It would allow weekly service in lower-density neighbourhoods without breaking the budget or taking curbside pickup away from anyone who needs it.
Bag tag pricing should be re-examined against current cost-of-services. The number was set years ago for a different cost base.
What I will push for on council
- A waste-management fee on the commercial operators whose packaging keeps showing up at cleanups; revenue restricted to public-bin capital, more frequent emptying, and community-cleanup support.
- City procurement standards that prefer reusable, returnable, and lower-impact packaging in everything the city itself buys.
- Active advocacy to the province for expanded deposit-return (coffee cups especially) and for extended producer responsibility on food-service packaging.
- A measured review of two-week residential pickup before any frequency change, with data on what is actually causing illegal dumping.
- Pilot community garbage collection points (community-mailbox model) in lower-density neighbourhoods, if measurement supports it.
- Re-examine bag tag pricing against current cost-of-services.