Mayor not optimistic blue box collection can continue for over 500 businesses and non-profits facing January deadline

(CTV News file image)

The mayor is being realistic about the potential to continue blue box collection to 535 small businesses, non-profits, and places of worship in London when responsibility for collecting recyclables shifts from the municipality to the private sector in January.

“The city is going to look into what sort of mitigating factors it can put in place,” Mayor Josh Morgan told CTV News after Tuesday’s Council meeting. “The challenge we have is that (since) there is no longer a provincial program, anything we put in place may be advantaging one business over another. “

When Ontario transitions to a producer-pay blue box system on Jan. 1, 2026 homeowners will not experience changes their curbside collection.

However, businesses, non-profits, and places of worship that currently have their blue boxes collected by the city’s contractor will no longer be eligible under the new system.

City Hall has been notified that recyclable materials from residential and non-residential sources will no longer be permitted to be mixed together.

“The reason we were able to pick this up is because we were driving by anyways, when the blue box program was our responsibility. Now it’s a producer responsibility.” Morgan explained.

Maintaining the existing service level would be costly.

“Municipal Council would have to design a whole new citywide program for the 500 or so that we were picking up because we were driving by collecting residential (blue boxes) anyways,” he adds.

Council requested that staff prepare a report outlining potential options, but Morgan isn’t optimistic.

He emphasizes that there are rules within the Municipal Act that could prevent providing a new collection service only to certain non-residential locations.

“We’ll look into what we can do, but my anticipation is it would be very difficult to do that because we’d be advantaging some businesses over others, and that’s likely what’s going to come back in our staff report,” the mayor predicts. “But Council wanted to get the information just so we cover the bases on this.”