The Canadian Experience with Privatizing Residential Solid Waste Collection Services

This article reports findings from an ongoing research project that focuses on the experiences of Canadian municipalities in contracting out municipal services. Although findings from this research indicate that Canadian municipal managers contract out a wide variety of services, this discussion reports only experiences of municipalities with respect to residential solid waste collection services. Data gathered from a cross-Canada survey of 126 municipalities conducted in 1981 and 1982 indicate that contracting of solid waste collection is widespread and that overall, contracting this service saves municipalities a significant amount of money. Since that data was collected, several municipalities in the Greater Vancouver region of British Columbia have converted from public (own forces) collection to private contracts. Case studies of two such cities (Richmond and West Vancouver) offer an in-depth look at the experiences of these two cities. Before and after comparisons of unit costs and productivity levels are presented to elaborate the main findings from the survey.