Waste Management App

We are on a quest to reduce our household waste.  At the same time reducing what has to go into the recycle bins is always a good thing as well.  Reducing is always better than recycling but recycling is better than it going to the curb for collection which finds it's way into the landfill.  Our municipality has two stream recycling so we have blue boxes (plastics, food cans, tin foil) and black boxes (fibers, cardboard, take-out coffee cups).  We also have a household hazardous waste event once a year for paints, stains, gasoline, pool chemicals, pesticides and medications but you have to take them to the transfer station yourself as well as yard waste collection from April 15 to June 15 and from October 15 to December 31.  Christmas tree are picked up on the day of your normal collection with each tree consider one bag towards your 4 bag limit.

The municipality sends out a nice paper calendar with all the collection information, the does and don't and pertinent information.  They have also put all this information on a handy free app for smart phones and tablets called my-waste™.  The app is a huge database of municipalities in Canada and the US participating.  To get your personalized waste management details, simply choose the country then type in your municipality.  Then type in your street address and all the information is at your fingertips.  The only glitch I ran into setting up the app was putting in the street direction which kept giving me no search results.  I set it back to the default 'street direction', hit search and up popped the information.  It is very easy to set reminders for all waste collection but I think it will be most helpful for the hazardous waste collection event.  The app also allows you to report waste collection problems directly from the app with an option to add a picture of the problem if desired.  You can even report road conditions, roadside debris, dead animal on road or a municipal tree requiring maintenance.

I'm hoping the municipality will give us an option for opting out of receiving the paper copy of the recycling calendar information.  It would certainly save a lot of paper if more folks used the app rather than the paper copy.  Now if we could just get the local newspaper to stop delivery whether we want it or not.  It's chuck full of flyers that we don't use, reaching weights of over 3 lb during the holiday season. 

Garden Gnome
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