January 13, 2010
New operator taking over Whistler Bottle Depot
Current owners grateful for chance to serve for more than 20 years
After more than 20 years of running the depot that handles Whistler's recyclable containers, Shelley Warne and Marilyn Moore are moving on to new adventures in the Lower Mainland.
The pair has sold Whistler Bottle Depot Ltd. to Rod Lotzkar of Delta-based Marpole Containers, which will take over operation of the depot at the municipal maintenance compound on Nesters Road on Jan. 29.
While Warne and Moore have had their struggles with municipal officials (mostly over the size and design of local container-handling facilities) and provincial ones (mostly over the frequency of trucks to haul away the depot's bottles and cans), Warne on Friday (Jan. 8) said the pair sees this is a chance for all involved to make a fresh start.
"Marpole Containers Ltd. does regional recycling," she said. "Rod is involved with depots on Vancouver Island and has been on the B.C. Bottle Depot Association board for a number of years. I know him very well and he's the best person to come up and negotiate with the RMOW and to enforce regulations.
"We've very relieved that we've got one of the best groups coming in to take over the depot operations and do the very best for the community and for sustainability."
Warne noted that the Whistler Bottle Depot started out in the late 1980s handling some 20,000 containers a year. Today that number has ballooned to almost 7 million, so it's not surprising that there have been growing pains, she said.
She said she and Moore have had their new business venture running in the city — she said it's not related to bottle depots but declined to be more specific — since August.
"We're sad but we're excited to move on," she said.
The depot has been running reasonably smoothly since this past summer, when Encorp Pacific — the firm that oversees the 170-odd bottle depots in B.C. —signed a contract with a new trucking company, Vanguard, to haul containers away from corridor bottle depots. The frequency of Vanguard's service allowed the Whistler depot to expand its opening times from 16 to 40 hours a week, or Thursday through Monday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Warne, though, said what's needed here is a fully enclosed facility with greater storage capacity, allowing customers and container handlers to work indoors during Whistler's cold, wet and/or snowy winters. In September, she told The Question that the depot's operators had begun looking into the possibility of relocating to the Woods-Bayly property, which was rezoned for industrial uses in 2008.
Rod and his brother Mark Lotzkar own several businesses that deal with recycling in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island, including Marpole, Regional Recycling and Pacific Metals.
The Lotzkar family has been in the business for almost 100 years, starting with father Joe Lotzkar, who died three years ago, Rod Lotzkar told The Question on Monday (Jan. 11).
The family owned a "cabin" near Green Lake from 1969 until about 2002 and Rod's mother now has a home in Nordic, he said. Joe Lotzkar was also a member of the Association of Whistler Area Residents for the Environment (AWARE), he said.
"Whistler's a place we've long had an interest in," he said, adding that he's been talking to Warne and Moore about purchasing the Whistler depot for about five years.
Lotzkar said Marpole plans to hire a manager for the Whistler depot but that he and his brother plan to be here frequently. He said he hopes to enter into discussions with municipal officials after the Olympics about the future of container recycling in Whistler.
"The existing premises is on city land and I know they want to maintain a bottle depot on that location, but the way we see it, there's too much commercial traffic on that site and that just makes it tough to run a proper depot," he said.
Lotzkar said that because of the amount of commercial traffic, the Nesters Road site is not a safe place for ordinary citizens to bring their for-deposit containers. Because there's no other place for people to bring those containers, a lot of those bottles and cans wind up in the ordinary recycling stream.
"We hope to expand what we're doing. We'll probably want to expand to two locations," Lotzkar said.
The Question's attempts to reach municipal officials for comment were unsuccessful.
Said Warne, "We'd just like to thank the community for allowing us to grow with them and we wish this operation to continue to support sustainability in Whistler."
http://www.whistlerquestion.com/article/20100113/WHISTLER01/301139793/1030/WHISTLER/new-operator-taking-over-whistler-bottle-depot
