With the arrival of a new semi-automated garbage truck, all of Moose Jaw will be under the green bin system by September. 

The new semi-automated garbage truck will service the Avenues, which were the last sections of the city that were still under manual garbage collection. 

The changeover was delayed as the manual collection truck was condemned due to its condition and the new truck, which was expected to arrive in the fall of 2021, didn’t arrive in Moose Jaw until very recently to be supply chain issues. City council on Monday night carrying forward about $242,000 from the 2021 budget to the 2022 budget to pay for the truck. 

Director of Public Works and Utilities Darrin Stephanson said, while the truck will be ready to hit the road right away, it will take some time to transition over to automated garbage collection. 

“It’ll be a number of weeks just to give people the heads up that it's coming, and then it'll take us a couple weeks to do the full roll out of about 700 bins with some temp staff,” he said. 

City Manager Jim Puffalt acknowledged that not everyone will be happy about the move to automated collection. 

“There'll be probably mixed reactions from that, because I think people are used to being able to throw up to six bags, and so I think there's going to be a little bit of a transitional period on that,” Puffalt said. 

He added that one of the advantages for the city moving in this direction is automated garbage collection should cut down on workplace injuries. 

“Automated garbage collection came as a result of employees' backs being wrecked. I know that some of the communities I worked in before there was automated garbage collection, we always had somebody on the workers compensation board because there were bags and you didn't know what was in bags and you're jarring your back picking them up so this is a good opportunity to mechanize a manual process that's really hard on people,” he said. 

The city is expected to release more information on the transition to automated garbage collection in these areas within the next few weeks.