Being schooled by the garbage collectors for placing a bag on top of the garbage bin is not enough. Taking five seconds to remove the bag from the bin to completely close the lid is not enough. For the bylaw infraction of placing a bag on top of the bin, the penalty is to haul your garbage to the city. Otherwise your garbage from the next two weeks will pile up beside your still full bin from the previous two weeks. That's because the city won't send the truck out again once an orange garbage sticker is permanently glued to your bin to teach you. If you don't haul your garbage yourself, a bylaw officer will be sent out. Don't pay and your property will be seized. We separate items into blue bags, clear bags, green bins, brown bins and we break down cardboard. If we now must deliver the garbage to the dump ourselves, why are we paying excessive garbage fees? But since we’re paying for garbage to be picked up, another two weeks is too long to wait for the garbage in a brown bin to be picked up. Garbage rules are a moving target. Shredding used to go into the blue bag but that jammed the machinery so now it goes into the brown bin. Styrofoam must already be hauled somewhere by taxpayers, since the city doesn’t pick up Styrofoam. It is used to pack almost any product one buys. We are a city governed by garbage. But the garbage rules are garbage themselves. What do we do with Styrofoam and what do with do with the garbage after we’ve been schooled by the garbage man? Because if we have to haul it away ourselves, I want a refund of the fees I’m paying. Other cities collect Styrofoam. If the brown bin were picked up every week, we would not need to place a bag of Styrofoam broken into itty bitty pieces on top of the brown bin every two weeks. Randy B. Williams, St. Albert
