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Red Deerians receive see black, blue carts

Black and blue are joining Red Deer’s green carts.
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Black and blue are joining Red Deer’s green carts.

The City of Red Deer is delivering new blue and black carts in various city neighbourhoods. The roll out, which started March 18, will continue until April 18.

Stuck to the black cart, Red Deer residents will find an education package with important dates, and key information such as what goes where and how to set out carts for collection.

The blue cart replaces blue recycling boxes, and the black cart is for all other household garbage. Together, with the green cart, the three bins complete the city’s cart implementation program.

Cart collection begins the week of May 6 on residents’ regular waste collection day.

With the new carts, waste, recycling and compost collection will be fully automated, said Janet Whitesell, waste management superintendent with the City of Red Deer.

Previously, contracted city staff got out of the trucks to collect waste manually.

“The carts we’re providing are designed for automation – so now the truck has a mechanical arm that reaches out and collects and grabs the carts and dumps it into the truck,” she said.

Without the lifting and bending, the process is safer for contracted employees. The carts also secure everything – for example, papers in the blue box on a windy day, said Whitesell. The lids also keep birds and animals out, she said.

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The city rolled out green carts around spring 2018 and that has gone over smoothly with Red Deerians.

“There’s always a few things that end up in the green cart that aren’t supposed to be there, but we’re seeing the common errors that we would expect to see, and it’s well within the range we would expect to see,” said Whitesell, giving bagged salad as an example.

“It’s plastic shopping bags or plastic that food comes in, like bagged salad, so when they didn’t get around to eating it before it went bad, sometimes people toss the whole bag with all the salad contents in it.”

She explained clean paper can be recycled, while paper towels or kleenex can go into the green cart. Clean pizza boxes can be recycled, but greasy pizza boxes with food bits stuck to them can go into the green cart.

Collection for the blue and black cart will take place every other week, on alternating weeks beginning the week of May 6. Green cart collection remains weekly.

Residents will receive a colour-coded calendar to make keeping track easy, or they can sign up for weekly notifications through Notify Red Deer at reddeer.ca/notifyreddeer.



mamta.lulla@reddeeradvocate.com

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