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BRUCE BARTLETT
TELEGRAPH-JOURNAL

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SAINT JOHN - Recycling trips to the blue bins will become simpler in August when the Fundy Region Solid Waste Commission reduces the number of bins from five to three.

"I think Saint John and region residents will appreciate the fact that, one, there won't be any increases in costs associated with this option, two, it will be much simpler to use," said Marc MacLeod, general manager of the commission, at its annual meeting Thursday night.

The same recyclables collected now will be accepted with fewer bins, he said. All plastics, both hard and soft, along with metal cans will go into one bin. A second bin will take paper and box board, such as cereal boxes as well as hard and soft covered books. The third bin will be reserved for corrugated cardboard (with the wavy material in the middle) as well as packing and appliance boxes.

"That's one of the big complaints we get is that people have to go up and down the bins," he said. "So it will be three bins all close together, nice and simple."

It will also make storing recyclables at home much simpler because fewer containers will be needed, he said.

The commission can reduce the number of bins used to collect recyclables because it is purchasing equipment to do material recovery on site, MacLeod, said.

"This will bring us in line with other facilities in the province, including Fredericton, Moncton and St. Stephen with regards to having the ability to purify and tailor our products," he said.

During the past 10 months the recycling markets have crashed so the new system was chosen to give the commission more flexibility on what recyclables it puts out to the market, he said.

"It will make out products more pure so we will actually have markets to sell our material to," he said. "As it stands now we have to purify our products without this capability, we actually have to pay to dispose of some of our products."

The new equipment will include a sorting conveyer belt to allow the plastics and metals to be sorted for bailing. The second piece of equipment will be a machine to packaged the material in bales.

The paper and cardboard will already be sorted before going to the baling machine.

The demands for unsorted rigid plastic is low now because of the economy, and the commission actually has to pay to get someone to take some of what it has. But with the new system it will be able to sell more of the material it gets in the blue bins, he said.

Last year the commission received 4,600 metric tonnes of recycling and this year the trend is 25 metric tonnes higher per month, MacLeod said.