BLAINE, Minn. – (Nov. 19, 2015) – Starting in January Blaine homeowners will see a different garbage truck driving down their street. The city will begin a new contract with Walters Recycling and Refuse and preparations for the transition are well underway. The city and Walters have launched an informational campaign online and through mailings to residents. The biggest part of the transition will be getting new recycling carts to all homes. That deployment will start in December.
“We’re going to start our cart deployment December 7 for the A week zone and December 14 for the B week zone so on your recycling week we’re just asking you just like regular service bring your cart down to the curb and we’re actually going to come by and we’re going to place our cart at the curb as well and your current hauler should be pulling their cart at that same time. If your recycling happened on a Monday and we didn’t switch that cart out don’t worry we’ll definitely be back within that next day,” said Walters Recycling and Refuse marketing and account coordinator Jackie Edwards.
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Residents will keep their current garbage and yard waste carts and next spring Walters will be putting new stickers on those carts to update them to the Walters brand. Cities are always looking for ways to increase recycling and that is a big part of this new partnership with Walters. “One of the things that they proposed and that we really liked is to upgrade the single family homes to 95 gallon recycling carts from the current 65 gallon. It’s not required but we think most people living in a single family home could benefit from that because if you look at what’s being recycled these days, so much material is recycling compared to what’s not. If you have a larger cart you can get more in it over a two week period of time. We think that alone will help the numbers go up. I also think they will be doing a really good job partnering with us on doing promotional materials to educate the resident as to everything that’s recyclable in the program” said Blaine recycling coordinator Roark Haver.
The city is also excited about the level of customer service that they will be able to give to the residents, thanks to the technology available from Walters. “We are also going to be able as a staff at city hall to be able to log into their system. If we get a call with someone concerned the truck hasn’t been by yet, we’ll be able to go in and see where that truck is on their route, whether or not it’s been by their house, if it was we will actually be able to tell them what time that was,” said Haver. Since its incorporation as a city 50 years ago Blaine has always had a city-wide hauler. They believe that is a more cost effective and efficient way to deliver this service.
“You have one truck collecting every household in an area so the drive distance between collections is less, you pick up more stops per hour, more stops per mile, all of that from an efficiency standpoint is a much more efficient way to go. You have the ability to spread that cost of all of those collections over a larger group so the cost per unit goes down. The other thing is you have fewer trucks running up and down your street so from a street wear and tear standpoint we think it’s an advantage to the resident on the street repair side of the cost which don’t show up on garbage side of costs,” said Haver. Walters is headquartered in Blaine and is very excited to serve its hometown and the city is excited to work with a local company that they expect will provide residents with great customer service.
“To actually service our hometown it’s a great honor to be honest with you. We take a lot of pride in servicing the residents of Blaine,” said Edwards. “I think you are going to see off the charts customer service. They are really well known for that,” said Haver. There are bound to be a few bumps in the road during the transition phase from the current hauler to Walters.
Residents are asked to remain patient. “Any time you do this kind of transition the number one thing that people can help us with is just be patient. If we get carts out there and people decide they want a different size cart if they could just wait until we get into January then we can go back and change out some of those after people realize they do want a larger one or smaller one so we can get the new vender up and running and go back and make changes and tweaks to that as we go along. So if people can just be patient with us as we’re dong this transition that helps us all.
