MLA responds to e-waste issue

An article in The Feb. 12 edition of The Hants Journal quoted West Hants Warden Richard Dauphinee as being upset because his constituents were allegedly left out of the province’s e-waste strategy. My note is too simply remind all residents of West Hants they are part of the new e-waste strategy and a location for Windsor-West Hants, if it hasn’t’ already been announced by the time you read this, will be within a matter of days.

The most important issue not mentioned in last week’s article was that in order to have an e-waste program for the local area, the Atlantic Canada Electronics Stewardship and Nova Scotia Resource Recovery Fund Board required an agent in the local area.

The original proposal of Aug. 1 contained a Windsor location. The proposal also called for rural Nova Scotia sites as of Feb. 1 to be strategically located to ensure that at least 90 per cent of the province’s rural population was within a 30-kilometer radius of the nearest drop-off. The proposal also called upon all drop-off sites to be open a minimum of 30 hours per week including five hours on Saturdays and to have a minimum of 1,000 square feet of floor space.

As late as Dec. 1, contracts were being finalized with drop-off sites across Nova Scotia including right here in Windsor-West Hants, until the principals involved said their interest had waned and they were no longer interested in participating. As a result, action was quickly launched to have a new site established locally.

It was surprising to me to learn the warden had not conversed with the two Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities representatives Peggy Crawford and Sherri Lewis, who were members of The Citizen’s Stakeholder Advisory Committee struck last June to gain some additional insight.

I trust the above information is of assistance to those individuals who may have read last week’s article and were led to believe Windsor-West Hants had become an afterthought in relation to the e-waste strategy. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

For those who might not have heard about the program through the media to date, you will now be able to take your televisions, notebook or laptop computers including the central processing unit and all other parts contained in the computer, your computer monitor, keyboards, cables, desktop printers and your mouse to your local e-waste depot.

Beginning Feb. 1,2009 you will also be able to take you old cell phones, audio and video playback and recording systems, other wireless devices, telephone sand fax machines and computer scanners, removing significant amounts of waste from our landfills on an annual basis. In fact it is the ultimate goal of the government to reduce our solid waste disposal rate to 300 kilograms per person per year by 2015.

Yours truly,

Chuck Porter, MLA

Hants West