We’re crunching through plastic margarine tubs, cookie wrappers, and broken glass, and Marilyn Jewer is explaining to me why piles of coffee cans and tetrapacks are mounting beside hills of newspaper this week. Jewer is a manager at the Peterborough Materials Recycling Facility, and she’s telling me this is an area that’s usually just used for going through paper, cardboard, and other things from your ‘fibre’ blue box. Because of all the leftover Christmas packaging getting picked up, though, they’re processing more material than usual. Outside, an inch or two of snow sits on top of bales of this mix of containers they’ve packed, waiting to be sorted and separated. And it’s possible they’re about to see a lot more bales piling up in the yard.
After your empty bottles of salsa and old copies of Arthur get tucked into blue boxes in both the city and county of Peterborough, they come to this plant to get sorted, bundled, and wait to get sold and trucked away. Every blue box system in Ontario works this way: cities (or contractors) collect the materials, sort it out by type and quality, and sell it to industries that use them to make new products. And since the early 1980s, programs like this have been a major part of keeping waste out of landfills.
“People in Peterborough recycle,” says Jewer. She tells me the idea of it seems more popular here than in Montreal, where she lived before coming to work for HGC Management, which runs the Peterborough plant.
Of course, once in a while everything from the “wild rice” of maggots and other bugs in jars in the summer to catheters comes through from the blue boxes. Once, Jewer says, she even found a box of ashes. A phone call to the crematorium connected her to the family, who said apologetically that they “thought the box was recyclable.” Overwhelmingly, she seems proud of the plant and the quality of the materials they produce. She even brings in her own recycling from home and sorts it herself.
“It’s one less box for my guys to pick through,” she says.
Unfortunately, the entire recycling industry in Ontario seems to be headed for hard times. John Jackson, who lectures on waste management at Trent, says the global economic slowdown is about to knock municipalities hard in the teeth.
“This year it’s going to be a disaster for them,” Jackson told Arthur over the phone. Revenues from selling materials pays for a big portion of the cost of these programs, and under the Waste Diversion Act enacted in 2002, an industry association called Stewardship Ontario is on the hook for half of the losses cities take on afterward. But those figures are based on data that’s always two years behind, because of how long it takes to measure and verify the numbers.
Meanwhile, he pointed out, municipalities incur costs immediately. The Collingwood-based Enterprise-Bulletin has reported that Owen Sound is anticipating as much as $150,000 in lost revenue for 2009 because of the market downturn, a figure which could go as high as $300,000. That’s out of a total cost of $500,000 to run the city’s blue box program.
Prices for newspaper, steel, all types of plastic and even aluminum – the one material cities usually make money on – are down. Ontario industry association Corporations Supporting Recycling shows the average price offered per metric tonne for aluminum dropped from $2203 in March 2008 to $1802 in December. Prices for the highest grade of corrugated cardboard fell to almost a fifth of what they previously were in the same period, and HDPE plastics plummeted more than two thirds. The sharpest drop has been since September, after the credit crisis started spreading.
Jackson said municipalities are playing “a charitable role” to industries in Ontario today. The Blue Box program is in many ways a child of non-refillable beverage containers that began booming in the soda industry in the 1960s. Mountains of the new cans and plastic bottles started showing up in municipal garbage, but industries bristled at demands to keep using glass and put in a new deposit-return system to help pay for the new containers’ diversion and recovery. Instead, they offered small donations to push a provincial recycling program and help find markets for recyclables. The province caved, and offered to help fund the programs, but gave most of the responsibility to municipalities.
Numbers show who’s really paying to divert all that waste. A study published by Waste Journal suggests that between 1985 and 1996, taxpayers contributed $2.33 billion to the Blue Box program and landfill costs, while industry chipped in a piddling $41 million. Only after the program reached the point of financial collapse in 1999 did the provincial government force industry to bear its current share.
“The paper industry doesn’t like the plastic industry but they’re united in fighting to reduce costs,” Jackson told Arthur. He’s optimistic, though, about legislation being proposed to have industry pay for the full costs of the Blue Boxes. It’s part of an increasing trend to adopt the Extended Producer Responsibility principle, putting onus on industry to pick up and find a use for materials after consumers can’t use their products anymore. Jackson said similar programs in Europe have resulted in reduced taxpayer burden and led to more products becoming easier to refill, dismantle, and recycle.
“Recycling isn’t a good enough solution. The real solution is to make products that can be reused,” said Jackson. “It means changing our approach to what products are like, so they’re made in different ways, so they can be upgraded.”
“It used to be if you talked about it, they’d laugh at you like you were a fool, but industry sees that this is the way it’s going,” he added.
In the meantime, at the Peterborough recycling plant, Jewer and I scan the yard as I ask her to estimate how long they could stockpile materials for if they couldn’t find markets for any of it, as other cities have begun doing. A mill that they sold paper and cardboard to once closed down for a month, she says, and they had to pay to get rid of it for a while. She seems genuinely surprised by the question, though, and adds she just isn’t sure.
“When it’s competitive and it’s doing well, it’s awesome.” But she adds that the market for plastic film, at least, has now all but evaporated. And surrounded by stacks of cardboard and cans twice my height, I wonder how long the status quo can last.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 September 2009 10:46
