By Dominic Abassi

Council Calls for New Report on Automated Garbage Collection

Jul 21, 2016 | 10:20 AM

Automated garbage collection will not be coming to about 9,000 Nanaimo homes in November.

That’s because this week, council dumped their plan from last year, asking staff instead to come back with new recommendations based on the core services review.

Council originally agreed to test automated garbage collection on 9,000 central Nanaimo homes. That decision came after considerable debate and was in opposition to a staff report last year recommending a three year roll out plan that would have covered the entire city. Two trucks, at a cost of about $850,000, have already been ordered and are on the way.

But included in the findings of the recently released core services review was a recommendation to roll out the automated collection city wide, all at once.

Sanitation manager Charlotte Davis says there are some financial benefits to moving ahead that way.

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“We stand to make some quite large financial savings in terms of purchasing in bulk, from both truck vendors and wheeled cart vendors,” said Davis.

The entire roll out is expected to cost between $7 and $7.5 million, according to Davis. That includes six large trucks, two small ones, as well as garbage, food waste and recycling carts for every home in Nanaimo.

Davis says a new report, with several options for council to consider, will come back in August. Those options will include city wide implementation, a phased approach or a pilot project.

Depending on what council decides, full implementation could take about 8 months.

“That’s how long it takes from ordering a truck to having it delivered. That’s the longest constraint that we have, so in between that we can order our wheeled carts and get our communication plan going. If council wanted to do the whole city, I would probably need eight months and then I’d be ready to implement.”

While the automation of the city’s collection will have an up-front cost, Davis says over the long-term the savings will be significant. The city currently pays about $800,000 a year for collection of recycling by a third party and that would be brought in house under the new system. Under the initial plan, the city would have seen savings by 2022.

The other big factor is safety. In 2014, injuries to sanitation workers cost the city more than $400,000. That is expected to be significantly lowered, if not eliminated, by the move to automation.