Riverdale’s recycling program seeing revenue decline
Arborg’s Riverdale Place Workshop is offering adults with intellectual challenges an opportunity to take part in day programs that are designed to get them into the workforce while at the same time meet their specialized care and socialization needs.
The workshop has been in operation for 49 years and is looking forward to its 50th anniversary next year, said workshop manager Alex Janower. And it’s hoping to attract to new participants to the program as numbers declined after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“After the COVID pandemic, the workshop participant attendance dropped to a low number of 13 participants. The workshop lost four participants, who decided to stay at home, four who relocated and six who passed away,” said Janower, who will be marking his 38th year with the workshop in January. “This greatly affected our financial outcome because government funding is attached to the individual attending. Funding is not attached to the number of spaces at your facility. Therefore, our revenue went down and the expenses each year have greatly increased.”
From 2017 to 2018, the workshop had 31 participants taking part in activities and that enabled the workshop to have a “sustainable operation,” said Janower.
Riverdale Place Workshop Inc. is a not-for-profit organization that provides vocational training, community involvement and employment for adults living with intellectual challenges. The workshop has full-time and part-time staff who offer adults with intellectual challenges an opportunity to take part in workforce activities – participants earn a small monthly income – and provide them with creative pursuits and socialization. The workshop offers activities such as games, sewing and craft-making of items such as Icelandic coffee bags, which are sold in the shop.
“We have a music teacher coming once per month teaching music and dancing. Every second Friday, the participants watch a movie or play different games. We are planning to bring back our meal program once our client attendance increases,” said Janower. “We also have a summer barbecue and Halloween and Christmas dinners and dance parties.”
He added that they’re open to new programming ideas or activities that participants and/or their parents would like to see offered at the workshop.
The workshop also employs its participants in a recycling program, which benefits the towns of Arborg and Riverton and the Municipality of Bifrost-Riverton. Participants pick up blue box recyclables from businesses and residences in the two towns each week, and they also collect items from recycling bins at the northern edge of Riverton, recycling depots in Pebble Beach and Hnausa and the Arborg-Bifrost landfill site. At the workshop’s warehouse, they sort, compress, wrap and ship recyclables such as cardboard, paper and plastics to Winnipeg.
Over the past few years, the recycling program has taken a bit of a hit because of market prices fluctuating, and it has not been feasible in terms of the revenue the workshop counts on to help support itself, said Janower. Cardboard in particular has seen prices per metric tonne fluctuate. And the price of gasoline has also chewed into the workshop’s budget.
“Over the last couple of years [prices for recycling products] have gone down so that’s not great,” said Janower. “Carboard improved this past year but it’s starting to go down again. I’m worried that it might go down further. The year before that, cardboard really dropped. I’m not sure why it went down and there were some places that weren’t even taking it.”
The Riverdale Place Workshop facility diverts a significant number of recyclables from the landfill each year. In 2023 it diverted 236,111 kilograms of recyclable materials from the landfill. The workshop, earned a Sustainability in Pollution Prevention Award from the provincial government in 2017.
The following is a friendly reminder of what residents and businesses can and cannot recycle.
Items that can be recycled:
Milk cartons, plastic milk jugs, juice boxes, PET plastic drink bottles of all sizes, aluminum cans including pop cans, tin cans, miscellaneous plastics (labelled 2 to 5), newspapers (tied in a bag or bundled), flyers, magazines and catalogues (tied in a bag or bundled), plastic liquor bottles, glass bottles and jars (please place in a box), corrugated cardboard (brown), box board from food items such cereal and noodles, and laundry boxes.
People are encouraged to rinse all their recyclable items and remove the labels if they can. Recyclables should also be placed in bags rather than thrown loosely into the recycling bins.
Items that cannot be recycled:
Styrofoam, Styrofoam egg cartons, diapers, dog waste in bags, garbage, plastic bags, Christmas wrapping paper, electronics (take to landfill), batteries (take to landfill) and oil containers (take to landfill).
For more information about Riverdale Place Workshop’s programs and activities for adult with intellectual challenges, call Alex Janower at (204) 376-5584.
