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Your recycling habits might be taking a toll on the recycling program

March 27th, 2018  |  News

As our post-millennium lifestyles advance over time, different materials are being put into the blue bins. We are recycling less newspapers, and more of us are mixing trash and food waste with recycling. This is an even bigger problem if you live in an apartment building, or rely on take-out.

Costs are going up for provincial recycling contracts across Canada, says CBC.

"It's a really a perfect storm of crazy stuff going on that means that the blue box has huge challenges that it did not have 10 years ago," says environmental consultant Maria Kelleher who specializes and researches waste reduction and recycling.

New items are being thrown out that weren’t too much of a problem a few decades ago. A spike in plastics, sometimes glued to other materials, has pushed recycling programs into overdrive. These are materials recycling plants were never meant to deal with on such an intensive level.

The materials they were supposed to collect, sort and resell are showing up less and less, and thus the revenue model that was designed around recycling is collapsing.

Kelleher says newspapers “used to be the backbone of the recycling program… because it’s easy to recycle and it’s worth a good bit of money” to companies that repurpose it.

Plastics have more than taken over recycling facilities; they cost more to collect and sort, and they are more difficult to recycle. Their value for resale is also precarious.

China leads the world in recycling imports, yet they closed their doors to shoddy plastics in January. They’re now requesting only “the cleanest and purest recyclable materials from places like Canada.”

As a last resort, cities like Halifax have had to turn to “burning their recyclable plastics or burying them in landfills.” This method of recycling goes against the very concept of the term.

History of blue bin

A little over 30 years ago, the first blue bin programs launched in Ontario. Many kids growing up during the program’s genesis have been recycling their whole lives. Often, your blue bin would only house “bottles, cans and mountains of newspaper.”

The decline of the newspaper subscription, that brought newspapers to the front doors of houses daily, has also undermined one of the reasons recycling was so profitable. People prefer to get their news online now, while their blue bins (and fridges) are full of plastics big and small.

Condiments in squeeze bottles, yogurt cups, plastic juice cartons, take-containers, coffee pods, and non-recyclable coffee cups now make the blue bin a nightmare to sort. Kelleher points to “consumers’ busy lifestyles” that fuel the reliance on small, individualized packages of ready-to-eat food and quick coffee concoctions.

Smaller plastics are harder to sort en mass than scattered larger plastics. Since plastics are so light, they are not worth as much when sold by the tonne. You also can’t compress recycling like garbage, because it wouldn’t allow for proper sorting.

Toronto’s level of contamination in recycling plants has grown an “average of about 25 per cent in recent years.” People don’t rinse their food packages out before placing them in bins and it results in quite a mess when the plastics get to the plant.

“Jim McKay, the city's general manager of solid waste management services, says every percentage point increase in contamination costs an extra $600,000 to $1 million a year. That's largely because it requires extra time and labour to collect contaminated material and dispose of it in the landfill.”

Solutions?

CBC says the most “obvious solution is technology.” If what was working 30 years ago isn’t working now, it may be time for municipalities to adapt, which also takes time. Part of the onus is on the companies that package the materials in the first place, they could be using less plastics, too.

But in the meantime, what can you do to make it a bit easier on the plants?

  • try to reduce the amount of recycling you produce (bring your own Tupperware)
  • pick paper packaging over plastic
  • bring your own bags when you go shopping
  • rinse your plastics and glasses out before you recycle them
  • take alcohol bottles back to the store
  • bring your own coffee mug!