WELLINGTON COUNTY – The county will not be replacing its plastic garbage bags with paper bags any time soon.
At Thursday’s county council meeting, Coun. Diane Ballantyne informed council that paper garbage bags will not replace the yellow plastic garbage bags the county offers due to the lack of data around its feasibility.
“We continue to investigate our environmental responsibility and impact with this month’s staff report on the feasibility of paper garbage bags versus the yellow plastic ones we currently use. There’s a thorough analysis of the pros and cons, and unfortunately, the cons outweigh the pros,” said Ballantyne during the meeting.
“There’s more cons mostly because there’s no precedent for paper garbage use, so there’s little data or comparisons available nor manufacturing capacity to draw from. As a result, staff didn’t recommend going forward with this.”
During the January 2022 county solid waste services committee meeting, comments were made in support of the concept of paper garbage bags.
Staff were directed to explore and report back to the committee on the feasibility of the County of Wellington adopting paper garbage bags as an option or alternative to traditional plastic garbage bags used in its user pay system.
Unfortunately, staff were unable to find any paper based garbage bags on the market; the only ones they could find were either for leaf and yard waste, for groceries or bagged lunches.
Without any examples of products on the market or lessons learned from other jurisdictions using paper garbage bags, there is not a readily available opportunity to present a comparison against plastic garbage bags.
According to a staff report, there are a number of undesirable outcomes that can be foreseen if the county were to make this change. There are also many unknown and complicating factors, and there is no precedent for a municipality using paper garbage bags to learn lessons from.
“The committee did discuss including recycled content in its user pay plastic bag. As such, staff will report back to the committee to determine the viability of recycled content in the user pay plastic bag with the caveat that it doesn't impact the performance of those bags,” Ballantyne said.
