Montreal’s move to biweekly trash pick up proving to be a slow process

Garbage, which was put out for pickup on the incorrect day, lays on the ground next to recycling bins that were collected by sanitation workers in Montreal on Wednesday, June 18, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov

The garbage may be piling up and causing some disgruntlement on the sidewalks of a few Montreal streets, but municipal officials say it’s all part of a plan to become a zero-waste city by the year 2030.

And they say their plan is working.

“People are making progress in their thinking, realizing that when they participate in the recycling collection, the organic waste collection, that there is not much waste left,” Marie-Andrée Mauger said.

As a member of the city’s executive committee in charge of ecological transition in Mayor Valérie Plante’s Projet Montréal party, Mauger is the point person overseeing a switch that has reduced the frequency of garbage collection in some neighbourhoods to a biweekly pickup.

Three boroughs —Saint-Laurent, Verdun and Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve — have started implementing the plan, which is also a part of Plante’s pledge to “make Montreal the greenest city in North America.”

But residents in Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve are not thrilled with the stench.

Jonathan Haiun, a spokesman for Ligue 33, a community group in eastern Montreal that advocates for quality of life issues, said spacing out the collection hasn’t had the desired effect since it was brought in late last year.

“The problem seems to be some people who just aren’t composting or at least not doing it properly, and then a lot of the stuff that we do find in the garbage is just a mix of everything,” Haiun said.

He later clarified that he believes the issue does not relate to the practice of composting or recycling, but rather that it’s the result of the city’s decision to scrap its weekly garbage collection.

“What we have been asking for since the beginning is that they go back to collecting garbage every week because we don’t feel that that’s actually an ecological measure.”

According to the most recent survey results conducted for the city and obtained by Ensemble Montreal, the opposition party at city hall, some 54 per cent of residents polled consider switching to trash pickup every two weeks “unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, other major Canadian cities have had biweekly pickup for years: Toronto since 2008, Halifax in 1999 and Vancouver in 2013.

In each case, there were growing pains but all happened hand-in-hand with organic waste collection.

Mauger said she expects that once composting extends to 100 per cent of the city by the end of 2025, things will begin to shift.

According to the Leger city survey, less than half of Montrealers use the so-called brown bin to dispose of organic waste, and their knowledge of what goes in the bin has only risen by one per cent, to 41 per cent, since 2021.

The survey results aren’t surprising and transition rarely comes without complaint, said Karel Ménard, a Montreal environmentalist.

“I think it’s a shared responsibility between the citizens, and the municipality, which has an obligation to have a clean and healthy city,” said Ménard, head of the Front commun québécois pour une gestion écologique des déchets, an organization that promotes ecological waste management.

“Also, I would even say, the producers, because what we often see in the alleys are short-lived, disposable items, so there’s also a problem of overconsumption.”

Many municipalities in the Greater Montreal area and elsewhere in Quebec, have switched to biweekly pickup, if not every three weeks or monthly in some cases.

But Greater Montreal is mainly suburbs with single-family homes, which isn’t the case in the city’s boroughs.

“There are 900,000 doors in Montreal, plus 40,000 businesses, industries, and institutions that have municipal collection,” Mauger said. “We estimate that eighty per cent of the buildings in Montreal don’t have their own driveway, so it’s not really one size fits all.”

The zero waste plan places an emphasis on reducing food waste, more composting and recycling.

The city has also prohibited the use of single-use plastic items, like cups, utensils and straws.

Opposition Coun. Stephanie Valenzuela of Ensemble Montréal said the polling results suggest Projet Montréal has a lot of work to do.

“The results really speak to the amount of energy and investment the city has been putting into informing residents on the goals that we’re trying to achieve,” Valenzuela said.

Valenzuela said the public reaction also contrasts with how the administration has portrayed itself as being innovative and avant-garde when it comes to the environment.

“We’ve seen that when it comes to their big promises, when it comes to the environment, they’re actually missing the mark,” Valenzuela said.

But Mauger is confident the city will be able to extend biweekly pickup to all 19 Montreal boroughs by 2029.

“What we see in this poll, it’s also that three-quarters of the population are aware of the problem of sending too much waste to the landfill that’s filling up at a very high pace,” Mauger said.

“And they want to do more to be part of the solution … so that’s really promising too.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 2, 2025.