City committee punts on vote to approve new recycling contract

The company that processes Winnipeg’s recycling wants the city to toss out the recommendation for its replacement.

After issuing a request for proposals last fall, city staff recommended granting the contract to Toronto-based Canada Fibers.

The Water and Waste Committee was supposed to vote Thursday on whether to pass that recommendation along to the mayor’s inner circle, but that never happened.

Emterra, the company currently tasked with Winnipeg’s recycling and whose contract expires Sep. 30, 2019, believes the city isn’t worried enough about the changing market for recycled materials.

Most of Winnipeg’s materials go to China, which last year established much more stringent guidelines about which materials it will accept. According to Emterra, the level of allowable contamination within the city’s request for proposals (two per cent) is much higher than what China is now allowing (0.5 per cent).

“The city doesn’t want to get into a position of retroactive contracting, where you’re changing the scope of work and negotiating after the fact,” said Emterra VP of Corporate Strategy and Business Development Paulina Leung.

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“Paper is worth $3.8 million. You can’t afford to not produce high quality papers that meet that 0.5 per cent threshold. If you don’t do that, you may not even have an end market. You don’t want to landfill or stockpile.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "Paper is worth $3.8 million. You can't afford to not produce high quality papers that meet that 0.5 per cent threshold. If you don't do that, you may not even have an end market. You don't want to landfill or stockpile."

Leung also complained that the city changed some of the parameters within the request for proposals just a week before the January deadline, but city staff rebutted that every other company competing for the contract also had to adjust.

CUPE Local 500 president Gord Delbridge also spoke at Thursday’s meeting, raising concerns about Canada Fibers’ past.

Last year, the company paid out more than $1 million to workers after an investigation found a breach of Toronto’s fair wage policies, which do not exist in Winnipeg.

“Nothing of the sort has been put into the RFP to ensure that workers are being treated with dignity,” Delbridge explained. “Labour is most certainly going to have a role when it comes to implementing any kind of fair wage policies. The track record that Winnipeg has with contracting out work isn’t good. We don’t have a very good reputation. They use Winnipeg as an example of what not to do.”

The committee is made up of four councillors: Janice Lukes, Jason Schreyer, Scott Gillingham and Brain Mayes, who chairs the committee.

They peppered city staff with questions about China, where a new plant will go, the details of the contract, and the issues raised by Emterra and CUPE.

As a result, they decided to kick the vote to April 16, giving them a chance to do some homework and sit down with staff to better understand the details.