Mayor John Hamilton proposed a new sanitation services delivery model Wednesday to benefit customers, employees, the community and the environment, according to a City of Bloomington press release.
The administration now recommends a phased-in approach to modernizing the way solid waste and recycling are collected, according to the release.
This includes mechanized lifters, uniform rolling carts for each household, volume-based pricing and weekly single-stream recycling by summer 2017. The city will continue to refine details of the new system and welcomes feedback from the public, according to the release.
Hamilton said during the press conference the current system is an inefficient approach, is dangerous and results in high numbers of employee injuries and high costs related to workers’ compensation.
“I want my administration to pick important problems, and then solve them,” Hamilton said in the release. “Bringing our sanitation services into the 21st century is one important problem we want to solve. We are going to try some new things with our trash and recycling. Some may work better than others, but we’re going to keep the focus on employee safety, efficiency, cost savings and what’s best for the environment.”
The goal of the new trash and recycling system focuses on three key concerns. These concerns are employee safety and wellness, replacing an aging fleet of sanitation trucks that are beyond their normal usefulness and implementing a smart city approach to generate and use data to improve service delivery, lower environmental impact and save costs.
The city will phase in replacement vehicles to support the new collection system over the next four years.
This spread is in place because it can disseminate capital outlay and set benchmarks and service delivery standards. These standards are based on local experiences and data, provide flexibility in the timing of implementation and continue to receive public input, according to the release.
The new system would eliminate the need for trash stickers. Sanitation customers would be billed through their existing City of Bloomington utilities bill and would have all the options for online payment they have currently for their utility bill, according to the release.
“I think this change is going to give our residents some clear benefits,” Public Works Director Adam Wason said in the release. “No more trash stickers, single stream recycling will now be provided weekly and customers will have nice wheeled carts to put trash and recycling in. I’m excited to roll this out, both for the convenience of our customers and the safety of our employees.”
Alyson Malinger
