Bags of garbage dumped off bridge into water in Cape Breton

Entire bags of trash were found in the water near a Cape Breton beach.

A police officer spent Friday morning fishing garbage out of the water off Pond Road in Little Pond, N.S. after several bags of trash were apparently dumped off the bridge there.

“This is not acceptable,” said CBRM District 1 Coun. Gordon MacDonald, who called police to clean the site up and investigate who might be responsible.

“[The officer] is going to go through it and it looks like he’s got something down there right now that he can identify who it may be,” MacDonald said, noting fines start at $687.

The Cape Breton Environmental Association has been doing cleanups at illegal dumping sites for years. He mentions a recent decision by the municipality to cancel its annual heavy garbage pickup this spring in favour of a Call to Haul program.

Yates said on Friday he’s not sure this decision will actually result in more dump sites like these.

“We don’t really see a lot of bulky items anymore. It’s mostly black bags,” Yates said.

“It’s going to depend a lot on the success of this project, how that rolls out in the next little while, but we’ll be keeping a close eye. We’ve always supported heavy garbage pickup, but we were hoping to change and anything that benefits Solid Waste management in the community is a good thing.”

On Saturday, from noon until 2 p.m., Yates’ group is holding a cleanup in a commercial area along SPAR Road in Sydney, N.S., where he says the trash is largely what is leftover from big box stores after a long winter as opposed to illegal dumping.

Coun. MacDonald added that it was a waste of taxpayer resources for a police officer to clean up the trash from the water.

“When you’ve got the gall to dump it in the waterway, the maximum fine should be what it should take to offset the cost that we’re paying to pick this up,” he said.

The new changes to solid waste pickup in CBRM take effect May 1.

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