New year brings changes to recycling and waste collection

Jeff Helsdon, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Tillsonburg residents will see a few changes to Blue Box pick-up, with larger changes in store a year away.

Recycling of plastic film – which includes plastic bags, plastic wrap, bubble wrap, and wrap on meat or produce – will no longer be accepted at the Tillsonburg Transfer Station. Ditto for Styrofoam packaging – which encompasses hard, white Styrofoam and meat trays. Instead, both will now be accepted in the Blue Box.

The changes are part of a sweeping move to change how recycling is handled in Ontario. It will see the responsibility and cost of recycling transferred from municipalities to the companies that produce the waste. As part of the changes, Blue Box pick-up for businesses is no longer included. However, Oxford County council decided to continue this service.

“Under the new blue box regulation, they are no longer eligible to receive that, and the county wanted to ensure they continue to receive that service,” said Frank Gross, Senior Manager of Transportation and Waste Management.

Businesses need to register, though, to receive Blue Box pick-up. A link is on the Oxford County website to sign up.

While at first blush, it may appear that the county will be seeing tremendous savings in its waste budget, Gross said that isn’t the case. He said the contract for garbage pick-up - which the county is still responsible for - increased in price, there is a cost for business recycling pick-up and the new Green Bin service. This necessitated the first increase in bag tag fees in 10 years, from $2 to $3.

Gross explained the pick-up of compostable material, which is only being done in 2025 in South-West Oxford and Woodstock, will be expanded to the entire county next year. Provincial regulations state that urban municipalities that meet a size threshold, which Woodstock does, and Tillsonburg and Ingersoll are close to, must have compostable material pick-up. County council made the decision to expand this county-wide.

Although SWOX has had a six-day garbage and recycling pick-up for several years, it will be expanded across the county next year. Gross admitted this could cause confusion initially, but said people will get used to it.

With that change, he said there are 10 fewer pick-ups per year, and the total cost of bag tags for a household putting out one bag should be similar to what it is with weekly pick-up.

Organic material collected in the Green Bins will go to a pre-processing facility near Drumbo, where contamination is removed. It then goes to a facility in London, where it is treated in anaerobic digesters, and the off-gases are collected and fed back into the natural gas system. The organic material left at the end is used for fertilizer in agriculture.

Gross said the decision was made to go county-wide with the organic pick-up when it was found that 60 per cent of the waste in garbage bags, measured by weight, was organic material. It’s expected that this will extend the life of the Salford Landfill Site by 10 years. When it opened in 1986, before the implementation of Blue Boxes, its estimated lifespan was only 30 years.