Mayor Sue McKortoff visited the landfill site on Friday to make a proclamation of Waste Reduction Week in Canada for the Town of Osoyoos. She was accompanied by scale operator Jill Beck. She used the occasion to drop off some of her own glass for recycling. (Richard McGuire photo)

When Mayor Sue McKortoff visited the town’s landfill site last Friday, she had official business to perform – a proclamation that the week of Oct. 15 to 21 is “Waste Reduction Week in Canada in the Town of Osoyoos.”

She also had personal business – some plastics and glass to recycle and some yard waste to compost.

The annual week is a chance for mayors and others across Canada to try to raise awareness of the need to reduce garbage going into the landfill by “reducing, reusing and recycling.”

“Find out what can be recycled and what can’t,” McKortoff suggested.

That’s sometimes easier said than done, even though the Town of Osoyoos has a brochure sent out with tax notices telling what can be recycled and where.

“I just found out something this morning,” McKortoff confessed. “That Ziploc bags cannot be recycled with plastic bags. Thanks heavens Jill was here to teach me about that.”

That would be Jill Beck, the town employee responsible for the weigh scale, who tries hard to ensure that the landfill and recycling run smoothly, with no contamination of recyclables and everything in the proper place.

It’s often a thankless job, and Beck is sometimes called nasty things by people who see it as “a dump” where they can throw anything they want.

“The challenges are people not cleaning their recycling,” said Beck, when asked about the difficulties educating people on recycling. “They think that gum boots are recyclable. All they have to do is come to the scale house and ask. We have pamphlets and we’re prepared to help them.”

Recycling should be cleaned, rinsed and separated, she said. Bags are not acceptable with the recycling except with shredded paper.

“Those are our biggest challenges,” she said.

McKortoff recently went to dispose of some old Kodak slide carousels and she was disappointed to learn that most of the materials could not be recycled.

“The only thing that could be recycled was the box that they came in,” she said. All the plastics and slides were garbage. “I felt terrible.”

If an environmentalist mayor has challenges learning the recycling system, it begs the question of how less-committed citizens can navigate the complexity of recycling in B.C.

“I think education is so important and we need to continue to re-use things, cut down on single use, plastics and everything so we don’t have to recycle those, because they don’t recycle well,” she said.

There are many different types of plastics, she said, and people need to be a little bit more careful.

While the sorting by plastic type is necessary at the landfill’s recycling area, residents putting out their recycling in curb-side blue bags can mix recycling, but they still need to know what to leave out.

Next year, said McKortoff, Recycle BC is not going to allow blue bags.

“We’re not quite sure where that’s going,” said McKortoff, noting that some South Okanagan communities are going with bins, something Osoyoos council decided not to do.

Council on Monday voted to send a letter to the provincial government and Recycle BC objecting to this decision.

McKortoff said there are still people coming to the landfill thinking they can dump whatever they want, wherever they want.

“When somebody says to me, ‘I have to go to the dump,’ I say, ‘Do you mean the sanitary landfill?’ They always look at me like I’m crazy,” she said.

But she quickly adds that Bill and Jill Beck of B&B Wood Grinding, the contracted operators, have done a good job of organizing the landfill and this has ultimately saved the town 25 years of landfill costs.

“If we had to start looking at another place to put a landfill, it would cost millions, so added onto the pool, the town hall and the health centre and we’re looking for multi-levels of lottery wins our way,” she said, referring to her joke at the recent all-candidates forum that with the costs of new facilities, someone needs to win the lottery and donate the proceeds to the town.

RICHARD McGUIRE

Osoyoos Times

Mayor Sue McKortoff visited the landfill site on Friday to make a proclamation of Waste Reduction Week in Canada for the Town of Osoyoos. She was accompanied by scale operator Jill Beck. She used the occasion to drop off some of her own recycling. (Richard McGuire photo)