Montreal to cancel contract at recycling sorting center as bales pile up in sprinkler system

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Montreal is ready to cancel its contract with a businessman who operates the city’s Lachine recycling sorting center, as the accumulated paper bales have reached as high as the sprinkler system.

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The firm, Services Ricova Inc., warned the city in early September that it would have to stop accepting recyclable material collected weekly from Montreal homes because the market for the sale of reclaimed material has collapsed.

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At a city council meeting on Monday, opposition leader Aref Salem, who leads the Ensemble Montréal party, criticized Mayor Valérie Plante and her Projet Montréal administration over the situation, saying the problem with the contractor has been resolved. aggravated for months.

“We realize that the environment is just a catchphrase for this administration,” Salem said during the councilors’ question period, adding that the Montreal inspector general’s office recommended canceling Ricova’s contract six months ago. “We don’t have any plan coming forward with this administration.”

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However, Plante said his administration was acting responsibly because “kicking out” Ricova six months ago would have caused a disruption to recycling collection service in Montreal, he said.

“We are acting diligently,” Plante said.

The board voted Monday night on a resolution to cancel Ricova’s contract by Nov. 14. The date will be determined by the city’s environmental director, the resolution says.

In the meantime, the city has approved the transfer of operations to another contractor, Société VIA, a non-profit organization business.

However, Plante said he has “no problem” with giving in to the opposition’s demand for an extraordinary town hall meeting on the recycling center problem. The special meeting is expected to be convened sometime next week.

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Ensemble Montréal said it has more questions for the administration since Ricova also has the contract to operate the municipal recycling sorting center in the St-Michel district.

Councilwoman Marie-Andrée Mauger, a member of the city executive committee responsible for the dossier, told the council that canceling Ricova’s contract was “complicated” because the city first wanted to take action to prevent the company from receiving five-year municipal contracts for bad performance.

Ricova is seeking to overturn that decision in court, alleging that the city acted “illegally” and “on unsubstantiated conclusions” of the inspector general. An inspector general investigation concluded in March that the company was understating how much it received from the sale of recycled materials, a violation of its contract with the city.

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Meanwhile, Mauger on Monday warned the opposition to stop “crying wolf.”

Ensemble Montréal councilors suggested that hundreds of accumulated bales of material will end up in landfills. Mauger said none of it to date has been sent to landfill.

The recycling sorting center at Fairway and François-Lenoir Sts. in Lachine has been plagued with problems since the city awarded a $46.2 million contract to build and operate the facility in 2017. The winning bidder filed for creditor protection in 2020 before the facility was completed. Ricova acquired the contract from the company the same year, but to date has not fully completed construction, says a civil service report presented to the council on Monday.

Under its contract, Ricova has been responsible for accepting the domestic recyclables and carrying out the sorting operations at the facility at its own expense in the meantime, but has not met the quality standards set out in the contract for the sorted material, says the report. . The company, he says, blamed the materials it was receiving from the city.

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The city sent the company several notices and demand letters, he says. On July 25, the city sent Ricova another demand letter “mainly because this time the material was building up inside the building, sometimes beyond the sprinkler system.”

The matter is urgent, the report adds, because in 2021 there were two fires in the center.

Ricova told the city in July that it has trouble selling the recyclable material, specifically paper and cardboard, locally and abroad. On September 6, the company’s president, Dominic Colubriale, informed the city that Ricova will no longer be able to receive recyclable material at the Lachine center after 9/11, the report says. Since then, he adds, material has accumulated on the site and “the city is constantly at risk of Ricova not receiving recyclable materials.”

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