Residents are dissatisfied after a year of the District of Muskoka’s new garbage disposal arrangements at Go Home Lake.
That’s according to Geoff Hogan, President of the Go Home Lake Cottage Owners’ Association, who said residents are now forced to make special trips just to drop off garbage.
“They’re burning extra fuel; they’re causing more boat traffic, more environmental damage. All those sorts of things are happening because we’re making extra trips to take and adjust our garbage to the disposal site,” said Hogan.
Hogan said previously, residents at the lake had garbage bins at two locations where they could drop off their waste. However, the District changed the system a year ago, replacing it with lakeside garbage collection.
“The District brings a garbage truck to one location on the lake three days a week for a four to five-hour window, and people are required to bring their garbage down during that window,” said Hogan.
During the winter, residents with cottages at the lake who live in Toronto have been putting their garbage in their cars and taking it back to Toronto, according to Hogan.
“They (District) didn’t consider the safety of coming through narrow channels; they didn’t think about the erosion of shorelines. All of that is an impact on the environment, an impact of the cottagers on the lake,” he said.
He said he hopes the District will create a new depot site at the end of the road with managed access. As under the previous system, people who did not live nearby used to drop off garbage there, making it more difficult to separate recyclables.
“Just like anybody, we want to have a municipal service that is paid for through our municipal taxes to collect our garbage and dispose of it the way every other municipality does,” said Hogan.
James Steele, Commissioner of Engineering and Public Works for the District, said garbage bins were replaced with curbside collection, and lakeside collection in the case of Go Home Lake, as part of a District-wide initiative to remove 80 unsupervised dumpster sites.
He said the new system was introduced because curbside collection achieves better diversion rates compared to drop-off locations and previously unstaffed dumpster sites.
“There were a lot of challenges with folks taking advantage of the fact that there was no one monitoring it,” he said. “Anything that was dropped off at those facilities almost all went to the garbage, as opposed to drop-off locations where folks are sorting properly. Curbside is even better because there’s very much ownership of waste because it’s in front of their house.”
Steele acknowledged the dissatisfaction among some residents and noted the change requires adjustment, as it differs from the previous practice of dropping garbage off by boat at a dumpster.
According to Steele, staff evaluate and collect data each year to make updates and changes where necessary.
“We evaluate the system to say, are we spending taxpayer dollars in the best way possible to gain the best use of the system?” he said. “When we’ve done the analysis…we make tweaks so that we’re optimizing the service to capture the most users and giving them the best service possible.”
Steele said one of the biggest challenges is accommodating everyone’s different schedules, and that while they aim to meet the needs of most residents, they can’t always match every individual’s timing.
He also said that if, for some reason, people can not make it to the garbage truck during its hours of service, they can always go to the South Gibson Lake Depot, which is the closest one to the Go Home Lake.
According to Steele, staff is looking to propose that the District adjust the operating hours of the South Gibson Lake Depot, based on 2025 data.
“We just didn’t see very much use on the Saturday,” said Steele. “So we’re taking the dollars that we would have spent on the Saturday for the truck to be sitting there for no use and transferring that to additional hours at the South Gibson depot.”
