General News » Uncategorized

Orangeville man brings hockey rink remnants to council

May 15, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

Aspects of a hockey arena’s ice surface linger after it has been dumped outside and melted.

The ice surfaces at many Canadian hockey arenas are removed with the culmination of the sport’s regular season. Ice surfaces that remain a few weeks longer for playoff teams are eventually removed as well.

It’s the same for Orangeville’s Tony Rose Memorial Sports Centre and the Alder Street Arena.

There’s something about the process by which an ice surface is removed that has Orangeville resident Matthew Smith wondering if there might be a better way.

He asked town council when it met on May 12 about the process used to clear the ice surface at the Tony Rose facility specifically.

The current way is to scrape the ice from the rink and to dump it along with everything in it outside the arena.

And that’s what got Smith wondering about a more environmentally friendly way to do that annual chore. Especially because paper is used to colour the red and blue lines within the rink’s ice. There’s also white paint used to colour the surface.

“The leftover paper when everything melts gets blown all over the neighbourhood,” he said.

Smith produced for council a large ball of the paper from the Tony Rose arena that had blown to nearby neighbourhoods.

“I’d just like to know if there’s some mitigation method that can be investigated or just a better practice that can be done to prevent all the paper from polluting the neighbourhood,” he said.

Heather Savage, the town’s general manager of community services, said she would look into the issue and ask staff if a better method to strip the ice rinks can be employed.

Readers Comments (0)