The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
They say one person's junk is another person's treasure. That old adage appears to have merit given the amount of people Doreen Murray has seen sifting through the garbage at the Flin Flon Municipal Landfill. But Murray and her counterparts within the Flin Flon and District Environment Council are unwilling to accept that practice now that they've assumed operation of the landfill. "We discourage it very strongly. If those people persist, we probably will look at taking down license plate numbers and reporting them," said Murray, administrator of the environment council's main project, the Flin Flon Recycling Centre. Besides being unsanitary, Murray said that scavenging through the garbage violates a City of Flin Flon by-law. The environment council hopes to make the landfill a cleaner, more efficient operation and Murray feels that allowing people to pick through the trash would hinder that objective. "They sure make a mess," she said of the garbage pickers. Murray believes the garbage pickers are typically after items which may be redeemed for money, such as aluminum cans and beer bottles. "If that means breaking open bags to find what they want, that's normally what they will do," she said. Murray said people who pick through the garbage are only part of this problem. Once the bags are ripped, she said, birds and other animals tend to spread the garbage even further. To help address both of those issues, Murray said landfill staff will attempt to cover the garbage with fill on a more frequent basis. Of course, preventing garbage picking won't be the primary focus of the environment council's takeover of the landfill, which began today. "But it is one of the measures that would give us greater control over what happens out there," said Murray.
