No recycling for City of Prince Rupert announcement on Recycling plan suspension

The Kaien Road Recycling Centre will continue to
see a good volume of visitors as the City of Prince
Rupert delays its curbside recycling program until 2022

One and done seems to be the approach that Prince Rupert City Council has taken when it comes to any explanations on the recent announcement of the suspension of the introduction of curbside recycling in the city.

As we noted last week, the City released a short advisory on the delay late in the afternoon on Friday, which in true bureaucratic tradition is the dumping ground for news that isn't particular positive.

That so far has made for the only relay of information on the decision to defer the plan until January of 2022. 

The topic not making for much note on the Council members public Social media streams, while neither the Mayor or any of the Council members took the initiative to expand on the decision as part of the Monday City Council session.

On Friday, Director of Operations Richard Pucci who is helming the roll out of the program made a brief mention of the reasons behind the deferral of the program to January

In developing this new service for the community, the Operations Department faced many setbacks, ranging from COVID delays and interruptions to route and scheduling conflicts to new equipment and technology challenges.

Yet, on Monday, just three days after the late in the day Friday announcement, none of the council members took advantage of the opportunity to seek out some clarification and expand on those challenges, the topic slipping their minds it appears, despite the announced launch of a few months ago making for much celebration.

Lost from the Monday evening Council session was the chance to seek any further background of the Director of Operations, who was on hand on Monday as part of a large contingent of City staffers in attendance at the Lester Centre Council session.

As the Friday statement noted the city will use the next four months to work out the issues that made for the "slight setback":

“Our Department wants to provide the community with the most efficient and effective weekly solid waste and recycling program with the least amount of service interruptions. At this point, I do not believe that our program is ready to launch, so our Department will use the coming months to streamline the rollout process. We want this program to be scalable and adaptable as we move to increase the amount of recyclables and decrease the amount of waste from each household. It is important that this program can evolve over time and, when possible, include a curbside organic stream. We understand this is a slight setback, and the community is eager and looking forward to this new service; however, in order for it to be successful, it needs to be ready.” -- Richard Pucci, Director of Operations and Intergovernmental Relations.

The lay low strategy may be paying off some dividends mind you, other than a TV7 story from Monday, the announcement of the suspension of the curbside program until 2022 hasn't seemed to capture much attention from the local media.

With that kind of an information gap, Prince Rupert residents can hope perhaps that their elected council members may offer up some occasional public updates outside of a late Friday notice towards the progress of that work.

You can review what they did discuss on Monday night from our archive page here.

For a look at some of the history of the city's garbage and recycling plans see our archive page here.