15 million for purple bags by 2025

As of December 2021, Quebec City estimates the annual cost of its purple bags at around 1.3 million per year. However, upon checking, it appears that this amount only anticipated the start of deliveries by the end of 2022.

Therefore, starting next year, the cost incurred by the Residual Materials Management Service for purchasing and distributing rolls of plastic bags reached 6.25 million. The partially outdated budget was finally established at 6.31 million in 2023, we learn from a response to a request for access to information.

Quebec City justifies the surplus by keeping its 1.85 million bags in stock “to be more resilient in the event of a supplier outage.” Also, the price of resin was at its “peak” while the distribution of purple bags went door-to-door on a large scale.

In 2024 and 2025, the municipality expects the bill to be less steep.

In total, Quebec’s citizens are expected to need 4.63 million annually to provide the purple bags used to collect food waste.

Over three years, the city plans to spend more than $15.5 million to purchase and distribute these.

A decrease in the unit cost of the bag, lower than what was paid last year, and a reduction in the number of bags per roll means lower costs than budgeted.

Unlike the more than 30.5 million bags ordered in 2023, Quebec plans to keep the volume to only about 22,000 annually this year and next.

“We found that the average number of bags used per household was slightly lower than our initial forecast. So it was decided to reduce the number of bags per roll to 40 instead of 48,” explains spokesperson Jean-Pascal Lavoie.

Always “Relevant”

The Marchand administration admits the cost is high, not to mention a significant improvement over the bill initially estimated.

Revised every year, the contract size reflects a volatile market, it is argued. Quebec says it is “highly dependent” on the price of the material, which provides other municipalities with bags to transport table waste to its biomethanization plant.

Although it believes it is on target for its purple bag costs, the city has still had to overrun costs in the past to implement the mega project launched under the Labeaume administration.

The construction of the biomethanization plant will cost 216 million, which is 73% more than the initial estimate, and will be completed in May 2023, almost ten years after the project was announced in its current version.

Despite continued increases and the cost of purple bags, Citi judges that the “bag-by-bag collection option remains the most appropriate” to avoid labor costs, trucks and breakages caused by brown bins.

“This formula avoids the use of a third collection, which would generate a significant amount of GHG emissions, and there is no need to install a new external container,” argues the municipal spokesperson.

From its calculation in 2021, Quebec City estimates that sorting food waste through purple bags will allow it to save 6.7 million per year in operating costs, according to which a third collection of brown bins will cost more in the long run. .