Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is a $125,000 counter of cans and jars, I suppose. It seems like an awfully expensive piece of equipment here to be proliferating, especially to simply count the number of cans being recycled. I know we hired some consultant I have never heard of here to come up with that idea. I don’t know what that cost us, but I’m pretty suspect about this.
I have had occasion to take recyclables out to the recycling location here for return on deposits. I
believe most of us do that in our own communities. The folks that are counting those do it lickety-split. With the glance of an eye, they can pick out an errant container that should not be in that category of container.
I’ve also had occasion, as probably several have, to work on fundraising efforts. I believe it’s BHP or one of the mines that provides the opportunity to fundraising groups to receive all their recyclables for several months when they haul them out and do the sorting and whatnot. We found it was very efficient and accurate to simply weigh the bags of containers, once sorted, and very accurate, again, on the number of containers that were in those bags. I would suggest that simply coming up with appropriately sensitive weigh scales would be a lot cheaper and just as accurate in meeting the 99 percent accuracy or whatever is required.
I would ask the Minister, as he goes forward with this, to also test some more practical means of doing the work and maybe ask for some local innovative minds to focus in on coming up with a cheaper method of achieving the same result and giving them a chance to do that. I suppose that’s a comment, but I’d welcome the Minister’s insights into this one.