BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via our website. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is about changes coming next year to waste collection in Barrie.
I am worried by the new recycling containers.
The current blue and grey boxes are already too large for our needs.
Although we get a daily newspaper, weekly magazines and the usual amount of junk mail, our paper recycling box is rarely more than a quarter full.
The plastics/metal recycling box does a bit better. We usually manage to half-fill ours each week, but if we took the trouble to squash some plastic containers, we could reduce that volume further.
Also, we actually use our garage for its intended purpose; we park two cars in it. Years ago, I built platforms in the garage on either side of the door to our house. Split firewood is stacked on one, with rounds yet to be split below. Eight wheels with tires are stacked on the other platform, along with our recycling boxes. Our lawn mower, an air compressor and a bicycle fit neatly beneath this second platform.
From their appearance in the supplied photograph, these large, wheeled containers will not be easy to lug up the stairs to our platform, and may indeed be too large to fit the available space. If we keep them outside in front of the garage, they will be a) unsightly, b) in the way when we wish to use a car, and c) inconvenient to fill with recyclables.
At present, these containers are kept beside the door between the garage and the house, accessible wearing pyjamas and slippers. Another container with beer and wine bottles waiting to be returned to the Beer Store lies nearby. (That brings to mind the question of how the Ford government intends to collect bottles and refund deposits when they have shut down the Beer Store.)
We should be encouraging people to buy goods with less packaging, not giving them ever-larger containers to hold it all.
Peter Bursztyn
Barrie
