Heather Wright/The Independent

Petrolia is  asking the Minister of the Environment to rip up the current recycling contract in the town and bring back the wheelie bins.

New regulations for recycling came into effect in Ontario Jan. 1 with producers of recycled goods paying for the program. New contracts for recycling providers were let with Petrolia’s contractor switching from Waste Management to Emterra. The switch included returning to using blue boxes instead of the larger wheelie bins introduced in town just a year ago.

Residents expressed their anger  online with the town taking the brunt of the criticism even though the changes and contract were provincially mandated.

In January, Mayor Brad Loosley said he’d spoken with the CEO of Circular Materials, the organization hiring recyclers for all of Ontario’s municipalities and said he had made a mistake and wasn’t aware Petrolia used the carts.

Allen Langdon told The Independent at the time the new contracts were mainly based on cost, not what recycling program was in place before.

Langdon says the contracts were awarded to companies in a region with a number of municipalities involved. Circular Materials, he said, wouldn’t have time to look into past contracts in a single municipality.

“We’ve been procuring for over 400 municipalities in a very tight window …we were working to establish that we would have a collector and collection services in place in time for the transition. That has been the primary focus.”

The answers didn’t satisfy the mayor and some members of the public. Norm Sutherland, in a letter to the editor, called for community action similar to what happened when the province threatened to close Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Hospital in the past.

Feb. 9, Loosley said both he and Sutherland had written to the Minister of the Environment, Todd McCarthy, individually. But Loosley felt action by council would hold a lot of weight.

In a motion passed by council, Loosley said it was evident that “municipalities around Southwestern Ontario now being serviced by Emterra under the new contracts are being serviced through curbside cart collection, and not blue box recycling” adding it was “evident that curbside cart collection is able to be serviced” by Emterra.”

The motion asks McCarthy to “review the situation and provide remedy for recycling Ontario (Circular Materials) to return cart collection for residential recycling in the Town of Petrolia.”

Loosley admitted that “nothing may happen from this, but we’ll see.”

Council passed the motion unanimously.