Losing Waste

By Carolyn Sloan

The Spectator

NovaNewsNow.com

While she is best known for her delightfully sharp wit and warm smile, when it comes to chronic offenders, it’s her job to make sure that they straighten up and sort right.

Grace Proszynska is the bylaw enforcement officer with Valley Waste Resource Management, a joint partnership between the eight municipalities across the Valley region that share a common waste management bylaw. Sometimes it means cracking down on residents and businesses who make little or no effort to sort their waste properly, but much of the time, her work involves educating people in the hopes that they can turn their bad habits around.

“My job is also to educate,” Grace explains. “I work with the people. Sometimes I just give them a warning and it helps.”

On average, she issues about 25 to 30 tickets a year. They’re small tickets at fines of $50 apiece, but they can hurt nonetheless. On rare occasions, about twice a year, bylaw offenders are taken to court. While it’s a very time consuming and costly process to complete all the paperwork involved, in some instances, it’s the only option, and they haven’t lost a case yet.

NEW CHANGES

With the new clear bag program taking effect April 1, amendments to the waste management bylaw being approved by municipalities across the region should make it easier to pinpoint problem sorters as well as enforce compliance. While the changes are mainly to support the switch to clear garbage bags, they also include alterations that will streamline the enforcement process, allowing Grace to issue summary offence tickets.

“It will help cut costs down,” she explains, “[but] it will probably result in more people being ticketed.”

Amendments to the bylaw also include the addition of some new clauses, including one that will make it easier to prosecute people for illegal dumping. It also includes rewording that will allow Valley Waste to deal with properties that accumulate large amounts of waste. This will save municipalities time and money, permitting them to focus on unsightly premises where junk is accumulated for the purpose of reuse.

“It’s less costly to tax payers to have the reworded clause,” Grace explains. “This bylaw would allow us to [issue] a clean up directive and the timeframe of clean up is up to us. The timeframe could be as short as one day. It could be up to two weeks if amounts of waste are huge.”

Another significant change is the addition of a new clause that will allow Valley Waste to stop collection of waste for offenders until they correct the problem. This gives the bylaw some “teeth,” says Grace. For example, in the case of an apartment building where there is a lot of improper sorting occurring, the bylaw enforcement officer would meet with the landlord and superintendent and ask them to document the waste disposal situation both inside and outside the building with digital photographs. After a period of probation, if the pictures improve, the waste collection would resume.

GETTING TOUGHER

Once the new clear bag program takes effect, there will be a grace period when the emphasis will be on educating the public, says Grace. After that, however, Valley Waste will become more firm with its approach.

The provincial government has set a target to reduce the amount of waste going to the landfill by a third by 2015, which means 300 kilograms of waste per person per year. At present, the Valley is at 400 kilograms, and while this is still better than the provincial average, 460 kilograms, there is still a lot of ground to be made.

“We will get tougher and tougher and very tough,” says Grace. “We all make mistakes, that’s how I look at it. You don’t want to be on the other side of the line. [Many people] want to take ownership and fix it. We are here to help you.”