If you lead the rest will follow.
The Town of Cochrane did exactly that when it came to their Roll With It program, and the Town of Coaldale has now rolled out their very own curbside-recycling program.
Cindy L’Hirondelle, Coaldale’s operations technologist, said their program has been a huge success in its first week and that much of the success can be attributed to Cochrane for offering information on how to create a sustainable program.
“It has been a priority for the town for more than a year now,” said L’Hirondelle, “and once we saw that we could provide the service without increasing our operating costs, it just made sense to go ahead and do it.”
Cochrane’s waste and recycling manager, Sharon Howland, said the town was happy to assist Coaldale with their program, as Cochrane has been able to benefit through collaborations with other organizations and it was nice to be able to return the favour.
“While we were far from the first municipality to implement an automated waste and recycling program,” explained Howland, “we were the first of the smaller municipalities in our region. We took the program components from other municipalities that we thought could be best applied here and shaped them to meet our unique community needs.”
Howland said that because Coaldale is similar to Cochrane economically, socially and topographically, programs that are successful here could translate into successes there.
The next step in Cochrane’s bid to reduce waste will be to bring forward the Zero Waste Framework, and Howland believes continuing to work in partnership with surrounding municipalities will be a definite positive.
“It means we can seek out best practices from other communities and shape them to meet our own unique Cochrane situation,” she said. “It means that we can be a leader through a combination of innovation and collaboration.”
The Zero Waste Framework is expected to mirror the City of Calgary’s ‘80 by 2020’ goal — to divert 80 per cent of the city’s waste by the year 2020.
Cochrane’s current diversion rate is between 34 and 40 per cent.
Howland highlighted five pathways the town must embrace to achieving their zero-waste ambitions — an organics strategy, multi-family dwelling recycling, industrial, commercial and institutional recycling, construction, renovation and demolition recycling and events and public spaces.
Council allowed administration to work toward implementation of a long-term waste management plan and public engagement during their Oct. 22 meeting.
Langdon residents began voting on a curbside recycling program on Nov. 5.
