Montreal’s move to biweekly trash pick up proving to be a slow process

The garbage may be piling up and causing some disgruntlement on the sidewalks of a few Montreal streets, but officials say it’s all to become a zero-waste city by the year 2030.

The garbage may be piling up and causing some disgruntlement on the sidewalks of a few Montreal streets, but municipal officials say it’s all part of a plan to become a zero-waste city by the year 2030.

And they say their plan is working.

“People are making progress in their thinking, realizing that when they participate in the recycling collection, the organic waste collection, that there is not much waste left,” Marie-Andrée Mauger said.

As a member of the city’s executive committee in charge of ecological transition in Mayor Valérie Plante’s Projet Montréal party, Mauger is the point person overseeing a switch that has reduced the frequency of garbage collection in some neighbourhoods to a biweekly pickup.

Three boroughs —St-Laurent, Verdun and Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve — have started implementing the plan, which is also a part of Plante’s pledge to “make Montreal the greenest city in North America.” But residents in Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve are not thrilled with the stench.

Jonathan Haiun, a spokesman for Ligue 33, a community group in eastern Montreal that advocates for quality of life issues, said spacing out the collection hasn’t had the desired effect since it was brought in late last year.

“The problem seems to be some people who just aren’t composting or at least not doing it properly, and then a lot of the stuff that we do find in the garbage is just a mix of everything,” Haiun said.

“What we have been asking for since the beginning is that they go back to collecting garbage every week because we don’t feel that that’s actually an ecological measure.”