Not easy for some to recover

If for many the art of recycling is well ingrained in their habits, others still have great difficulty determining what should be placed in the recycling, composting or waste bin.

A situation that the owner of an apartment building in downtown Victoriaville, Daniel Roy, regularly faces. The latter too often sees items in the recovery container installed in the parking lot of his building that should not be there. A situation that he deplores.

The day he reported the situation to La Nouvelle Union, he found a microwave and even a stroller in the container in question. “There are also people who have already left a couch, not to mention everything I find on the ground very close to the container,” he explains.

Waste which often comes, as he believes, from people who do not even live in the building to which the container is allocated. “In 20 years, I have seen all colors,” he laments. Mr. Roy, who makes it his duty to clean up the surroundings, cannot believe how some people are not sensitive to recovery. “In 2025, there is so much talk about the environment and its importance,” he says.

According to what he notices, people take the easy way out and throw everything away, just haphazardly. “There is still awareness to be raised,” he adds. Above all, once in the wrong container, it is at the sorting center that the problems are found, as he denounces.

On the side of the MRC of Arthabaska, manager of residual materials, we remind you that the recovery bins can accommodate paper and cardboard, plastics, metals (clean cans, aluminum cans, plates and unsoiled aluminum foil ), as well as glass. “In short, the containers, packaging and printed matter,” summarizes Jade Larochelle, awareness and communications officer at the MRC.

Clothing, batteries, long hoses, ropes and wires, as well as furniture, toys, propane tanks, chemicals as well as swimming pool products and items are refused. We might be tempted, for example, to recycle a plastic outdoor chair, believing that the material can be recovered, but this is not the case since it is not a container, ‘a packaging or a print.

There is always a way, thanks to the Gestrio 2.0 application in particular, to find where to dispose of different objects, in the right way. Conversely, it appears that more than 24% of the total weight buried is made up of recoverable materials. This therefore means that despite the large number of years where recovery has been in force in the region, there is still a lot of awareness raising to be done so that everyone contributes, simply by taking the right action, to reducing landfilling and ensuring effective recovery. There are still a lot of errors in the garbage bin. Often, people take shortcuts rather than wait for bulky waste collection or take items to the Ecocenter, as Jade Larochelle pointed out.