As time ticks down for the City of Sault Ste. Marie to transition local recycling and hazardous waste programs to producer responsibility, city officials have a few questions they'd like answered.
Ontario is mandating municipalities to have a full producer responsibility system in place by 2025, which would put the responsibility of product disposal on the shoulders of companies, rather than cities.
The city will be negotiating with what's known as a Producer Responsibility Organizations (PRO), which handle the collection and recycling of materials on behalf of producers.
It's thought that the PROs will handle residential collection while municipalities handle business and industrial sectors, but city officials said the transition isn't that simple.
"Most municipalities have one similar to ours in which you have residents and businesses meshed together, and so we can't quite decipher how that will be done at a contract level," said Susan Hamilton Beach, public works director.
Hamilton Beach said the city will also lose autonomy over how collection is run when it transitions to a producer responsibility system.
The city has questions surrounding this, and whether regional depots or return-to-retailer collection systems will be implemented.
"How the model is getting selected and whether or not it will be in the interest of Sault Ste. Marie at that point in time, we are strictly just remaining at the table to try and ask those questions," she said.
The City of Sault Ste. Marie is expecting to transition to full producer responsibility by Sept. 30, 2023.
