‘Eyesore’ waste collection carts disturb downtown businesses in Waterloo region

Are Waterloo Region’s new waste carts damaging Cambridge’s downtown image? CTV’s Alexandra Holyk finds out.

Some residents are calling the Region of Waterloo’s new waste collection carts an eyesore to businesses in downtown Hespeler and Galt.

The neighbourhoods are often admired for their historic architecture, but now the landscape is lined with big blue, black and green bins.

“Hespeler is a small-scale, human-scale friendly little village,” explained Cory de Villiers, chair for the Hespeler Village Business Improvement Area (BIA). “It doesn’t make sense for our businesses to have these massive bins.”

de Villiers feels the system isn’t suited for urban streets.

“It’s so impractical,” he said. “It’s just absolutely awful on so many levels.”

According to de Villiers, the BIA consulted with the region for two years but the concerns of businesses went unheard.

“The region ultimately decided after two years of consultations and thousands and thousands of meetings to simply go for the original solution that they had planned on doing the entire time,” he said.

At Cambridge Flowers & Co. on Queen Street East, the big bins are causing big problems.

“They put these big bins out here, that blocks my whole display window,” owner Goran Radulovic said.

“I don’t even have a back door to put these things in the back somewhere,” he continued. “On top of that, I’ve already had two bins stolen.”

Other businesses are getting creative with their storage solutions — housing the carts in a walk-in fridge.

In Galt, the bins outside Butcher Boutique on Main Street don’t belong to the business.

“I’m not sure where to put these bins actually,” owner Chad Harrison said. “These are the tenants’ bins upstairs. There’s nowhere to put it.”

Harrison opened his business in October. He said he was attracted to downtown Cambridge because of the area’s charm, but he’s concerned the carts take away its unique character.

“They’re an eyesore,” Harrison said. “But if we can paint them, maybe we can spruce them up, put some flowers on them, I don’t know. But it just doesn’t work for the downtown core.”

For Radulovic, the carts are comic relief.

“It looks funny to me,” he said. “It feels like something out of a movie, just seeing a bunch of bins. Like, Hespeler Village Bin City? I don’t know.”

The carts, he added, will likely continue to cause issues for his business and others.

“I think that it’s only going to get worse. And it’s going to get worse, not just for us.”

In the meantime, residents and business owners are encouraged to be patient and settle into the new routine.