Local resident Lisa White is upset with the size of recycling piles at the waste transfer station in Olds.
White was at the transfer station last week. She was so concerned with what she saw that she brought some photos to the Albertan.
“I thought, ‘I need to send these pictures to someone because now I'm mad,'” she said.
White goes to the waste transfer station frequently on behalf of an entity that works with clients. They bring shredded paper to the facility.
She says in the past, she was able to drive up right near one of the bays and drop the material off. Now, she says, she's only able to drop the paper off well away from there because the piles of paper are too high and long for her to be able to drive to a bay.
She also believes the paper that is dropped off there is not being processed as quickly as it once was.
“(The paper) I've put out there for a couple of weeks is just sitting there still; these great big clear bags of shredding. And I put it out there weeks ago. Every week I dump some off,” she said.
“Usually every week, they're done with it. They do something with it, right? I come back in a week, it's gone – they've done something to it. It's disposed of.
“It's not; it's sitting there.”
The waste transfer station is operated by Can Pak Environmental Inc.
Company president Mark Pedersen says residents aren't allowed to drop material off at the bays anymore “for insurance purposes.”
“There's an outside dumping area for them now,” he said.
Pedersen said staff direct people to that area when they come in to the facility.
As for the size of the piles, Pedersen said the company, which operates in Red Deer as well, takes paper from a wider area than ever before.
“We do over a thousand tons a month. So it's not out of the ordinary,” he said. “They may be more than she's ever seen before but they never did a thousand tons there in two years. We do a thousand metric tons of recycling a month.”
Pedersen said that volume represents material coming into the Olds facility and the Red Deer facility, which is processed and shipped out.
He said the Olds Waste Transfer Station itself handles about 450 metric tons a month.
“It's a lot of material. Now it's a real business,” he said.
Pedersen said in previous years, the Olds facility would not have handled anywhere near that volume, although when interviewed, he had no figures as to what that previous volume would be.
Pedersen said there's another factor in the size of the piles in Olds.
“Right now we're a little bit behind because we just put in a new processing plant up in Red Deer, so all of our single-stream material will be going to our new facility in Red Deer. We've just put in a $300,000 sorting line and screens and everything else,” he said.
“But we process everything. It's not a market problem at all, not one bit. It's just we process that much material.”
As for White's allegation that the paper she has dropped off has not been dealt with, Pedersen said, “we move every single day. We ship pretty much every day. It comes in, we process it and we ship it.
“Our cardboard goes back to mills in Ontario, mixed paper goes to China -- around the world. We have no problem at all moving any material; none whatsoever.”
Pedersen was asked if there are any health concerns arising from material left at the transfer station.
“No. None whatsoever,” he said.
"We do over a thousand tons a month. So it's not out of the ordinary. They may be more than she's ever seen before but they never did a thousand tons there in two years."MARK PEDERSENPRESIDENT CAN PAK ENVIRONMENTAL INC.
