It's Christmas weekend and Eldon Wallman, city of Steinbach Waste Management manager says, it’s time for city residents to start thinking about what they’ll be throwing out or recycling when it comes to Christmas wrapping paper, cardboard paper and trees.

Wallman says, there will be no garbage and recycling pick-up on Friday, December 24 or Monday, December 27. City residents will need to hang onto their garbage a couple of extra days this year and to store it appropriately. He says, “We get warned every year by the RCMP, don't give away what you got inside the house. Like that 70-inch flat-screen TV. That's not a wise thing to do. So, if you do get cardboard like that, turn it inside out, fold it up, and leave it in a nice little stack for the Eastman Recycling people to pick up. Try to avoid leaving it open face so people can read what it is.”

Next up, the Christmas wrapping paper. Wallman says, “That paper has generally already been recycled so many times that it can no longer be made into something else. The fibres are all gone

in it, and they can't be reconstructed into something else. So, unless you're buying the really expensive stuff in some of the really nice gift shops, don’t put your wrapping paper into the blue bins, because if the recycling guys see that, they won't pick it up. Christmas wrap is a no-no, we don't put that into our recycling.”

Then there are the live Christmas trees. Wallman says they start picking those up curb-side after Ukrainian Christmas, about the 2nd week of January. He asks that residents please make sure all the tinsel and ornaments have been removed, especially the special ones.

Looking back at 2021 Wallman says there was definitely an increase in the amount of garbage their Waste Management staff picked up. The reasons he says are that “There's less travel happening, more people are concentrating on maybe doing a renovation rather than a vacation. You know, they're building a new rec room, or they're doing a bathroom renovation. Whatever it is, we are seeing more waste coming in than we normally do. So, it's been good from that side for us. We're one of the businesses that are booming because of the whole pandemic thing, but for all the wrong reasons, right?”

When it comes to the city of Steinbach Pick-up-and-Walk event being cancelled two years in a row now, Wallman says, there are still people going out and doing their part to keep the city clean. “You know, I've even seen people walking dogs around their area, and they've got two garbage bags and I stopped one person asked him why the second one? He said, “well, just for litter”, it's not just for, you know, the business his dog is leaving behind. He's actually picking up litter too, and I think that's really neat. That is really cool.”

Now looking ahead to 2022 and what next year's city of Steinbach Garbage and Recycling Calendar looks like. Wallman says city residents should have received their copy in the mail last week, however, if you’d like another copy, you can download a PDF version from the city’s website.

He says, “We didn't add or move any houses around in the neighbourhoods, even though we're adding a lot of new homes in Steinbach. We've just let them

sort of increase. Basically, in Day 2 around the McKenzie west area, the Lexington and Park Hill subdivisions, those whole areas have grown substantially in the last two years, but we're just absorbing that all into that one day. But we’ll probably make some changes the following year because it's getting too much. That one day, in particular, is getting very large, so we'll make some changes next year, not this year.”

When it comes to changes in the pick-up process, Wallman says, “if the wheel isn't broken, we're not fixing it.” For now, Steinbach will stay with the manual pick-up process, Wallman says, his team has become very efficient and besides the city doesn’t have the 1.5 million dollars to move to an automated bin pick-up service.

Wallman has been working with the city since 2006 on bringing the automated system to Steinbach, however, the timing has never been good. “And now with Covid, the supply of these large bins is extremely limited and very hard to come by and the price of these bins is almost doubled. And there are no grants to apply for. And so, in the meantime, the guys do a really good job picking up the garbage and we're going to stay doing what we've been doing for many, many decades.”