Recycle issues; Blue Box!

I am quite upset with the City of Vancouver.

For many years we've had recycle collection using our blue box, which holds tin cans, glass bottles, plastic etc.

There's also yellow and blue bags which for years we've sorted various paper items into, and this of course all takes time and is a very messy rather thankless job, except if you love and adore Mother Earth and it makes you feel warm and happy that you are "saving" the planet.

(but please note that St. Louis MO doesn't recycle so how Vancouver is saving the planet when most other huge cities care less is a mystery to me)

Until 3 years ago I put up with all this messiness. Then something went wrong with our recycle truck driver. He seems to have lost his sense of direction. He goes down one side of our street, but gets lost and never returns for the other side. Then the blue boxes sit in the street and sometimes get crushed by the cars who park there, costing the city of Vancouver yet more money to replace.

A few years ago I began calling 311 to report on these missed times. Sometimes the truck returns later that night, sometimes later in the week. I determined to call each and every time this year that it happens. So we began 2016 with a bang. The truck went down our street sometime between 11 am and 2 pm on Tuesday January 5. That's the time I was away from home. The truck picked up all boxes on the West side of the street. He got lost and didn't return for our side, the East side, at all. 

Due to my experiences in the past, you have to report to 311 after 3 pm. So I did. I called at 4 pm. This is what I was told by Sandra: "It seems you live in a very strange layout of streets. The driver takes some time to return to your street to pick up your side."

Isn't this amazing? He is still lost 3 days later! The boxes are still sitting out there in the street. My case # is 7143106.

I'm going to blog about all the case numbers I receive this year. I checked out Vancouver's recycle website, and the notification was posted as you see at the top of this page. But it hasn't been that slippery this week. It was more slippery last week, and everything was picked up just fine.

On top of it all, the city is now going to give us a grey box; an EXTRA box to confuse us all even more, to say nothing of that lost driver.

PS: The boxes were picked up on Saturday, January 9.

The following Tuesday we didn't put it out at all, as it was empty, so that day was a great relief; we didn't have to worry about a thing.

By Loretta Houben