HALIFAX—One councillor thinks it’s time for Halifax to consider chucking recyclables and garbage into blue and black bins instead of bags.

Councillor Sam Austin has a motion coming to regional council on Tuesday asking for a staff report on “adopting a bin program for recycling and garbage.”

Austin did some research and found several cities across Canada, including Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal, use blue and black bins, similar in size and shape to Halifax’s green bins, for recycling and garbage.

In some cities, residents have to put their trash in a bag before putting it in the black bin, but according to Austin’s research, the waste goes directly into the bin in all the cities listed above.

“That would eliminate need for plastic bags in the system,” Austin said in an interview.

It was the municipality’s move towards a ban on plastic bags that got Austin thinking about the bins.

In December, council’s environment and sustainability standing committee voted in favour of banning plastic bags in the municipality. The committee hoped to lead the way in the province and create a makeshift provincewide ban by working with other municipalities.

That motion comes to council for a final vote on Tuesday, and a vote in favour would see a bylaw written by December 2019 to ban the distribution of single-use plastic bags.

“There was a lot of feedback from people, both people who were in favour of the ban and people who were against, writing and saying, ‘Yeah, you guys, it’s kind of hypocritical of you to be banning bags while at the same time basically requiring bags to put out recyclables and to put out garbage,’” Austin said.

“I mean the cost piece is probably the biggest limitation on it, but I think it’s an idea that’s at least worth a look, especially given where we seem to be heading on the plastic bag front.”

The cost is significant.

“When we rolled out the green bins to residents in 1999, the cost was $8 million dollars for 100,000 residents at that time,” municipal spokesperson Erin DiCarlo said in an email.

The number of households receiving waste pick-up services has only increased in the 20 years since, and was about 140,000 in 2013.

The cost of providing a bin to every household now would be about $12 million, Austin said, so blue and black bins would likely be at least $24 million.

“The only way to do that would be through a tax increase, obviously,” he said. “You can’t just come up with $24 million out of the blue.”

With a tax increase already all but guaranteed this year, Austin said it would be a few years before blue and black bins hit the curb.

“If it ends up happening some day, it’ll be years off,” he said. “Our service is contracted, so it’s not just the logistics of buying the bins, but then you’d also have to work it into the contracts, because of course the method of pick-up would have to change.”

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That means waste collection contracts could increase in price as well, creating further ongoing costs to the bins. Those are the kinds of numbers staff would produce for Austin’s report.

But for the average household, Austin believes there could actually be savings.

“How much does the average household spend on blue and black bags over the course of the year? If you average the cost out among all the households, it might even end up being a savings,” he said.

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