Heather Wright/The Independent

Plympton-Wyoming Mayor Gary Atkinson has been getting a lot of recycling questions from businesses.

It stems from the changes to recycling province wide which shifts the responsibility for paying for recycling services away from municipal governments and onto the producers of the materials. 

An organization called Circular Materials represents the producers and has been organizing contracts to pick up recycling across the province.

The changes have caused a hub-bub in Petrolia, where residents will return to blue boxes after a year of the larger, wheeled recycling bins.

More concerning across most of the province is loss of recycling services for businesses. 

The producers’ group told the province it could not pay the cost of business recycling and in 2023, the Ontario government changed the regulations, forcing commercial business to pay for their own recycling.

Plympton-Wyoming did write a letter to the province, expressing concern over the move in the summer, to no avail.

In Petrolia, the town has contracted its current waste disposal company to continue collecting business recycling. But that’s not the case in Plympton-Wyoming according to Director of Public Works, Paul daSilva.

“Over the last three years, we’ve had a contract with (Circular Materials) and what we’ve done is we picked up the recycling on their behalf, and they paid us back for it,” he told council Nov. 12.

“We recently received information from the ministry that said that they are not willing under any model, whether it be free, or whether the town actually paid them to do so, willing to pick up for any businesses.”

That means by Jan. 1, some businesses will either be paying a private company to haul away recycling or simply putting it the trash.

“We’ve also discussed …getting a price from Marcotte to continue to do so, but we don’t know how many businesses would be interested in that,” said daSilva, noting the municipality would end up being “the middle-man” and it could be more expensive.

daSilva noted for some businesses, paying for recycling services won’t be new.

“On Broadway Street, down the down the corridor here, many of those businesses pay their user fee and get curbside collection, whereas bigger commercial companies that produce a lot of waste, they have dumpsters that they pay for.”

The town will send out a letter to all businesses, alerting them of the coming changes and listing some of the private contractors in the area who may be able to help.