CARI's Initiatives

Len Shaw, executive director of the Canadian Association of Recycling Industries, talks about the initiatives his group is working on.

RT: Please tell me about the Canadian Association of Recycling Industries’ (CARI’s) work on the issue of rail service within Canada. What issues have your members experienced with rail service?

LS: Rail service is pretty much the same as in the U.S. We have basically two railways in Canada. They are not supplying the cars that we need, the cars that they say they are going to supply. The cars are coming in in poor condition with a bunch of junk in them. There are issues with regard to loading and there are a number of service issues.
 

In Canada our railways are not subject to our laws of normal competition, they are actually under the Canada Transportation Act. That act created the Canada Transportation Agency. If you have a service issue, you can go to them. It is a very prolonged, judicial type of system to go through. Right now we don’t have a commercial settlement for dealing with service issues. Canada last amended the act in 2008, and looking at a number of provisions primarily relating to dispute resolution and financial transactions, but they didn’t address service. However, they said that they would look at service began a review in March of 2008. The final report as a result of that review was sent to the minister of transportation just before Christmas. The government has basically accepted the report. It is moving a reasonable way to where we think it should go.

There is market dominance on the part of the railways right now, a kind of Golden Rule—They have the gold, they rule. We are trying to say that they have got to become fairer and more efficient, so that we can move material more quickly for the benefit of the whole country.

The panel has agreed that there is going to be a regulatory backstop—the railways will have to come to this commercial settlement. Now we don’t know the details; the report is there, but we haven’t seen it. Of course we are in the throes of an election, so we are not going to see a lot of detail until after that happens.

As I say, we are quite happy that it has gone a major way to try to level the playing field, but we would and we have always asked for independent data to be given by the railways to some group—we don’t care who it is—to tell us what their score is on supplying cars that we asked for, and not on an annualized basis because you can have many hiccups between one month and another. We want to know on a weekly basis. What happens if a guy asks for 100 cars, they say they will supply 80, and they end up right now supplying 70? Is that a 70 percent on the request or is that a 7/8 percentage on what they said they would supply?

CARI joined a coalition of 17 other associations that represented all sorts of industries. Our collective group represents well over 80 percent, closer to 90 percent, of the materials the railways are moving, so it has been a concerted and unified approach from all of the shippers. That is another indication that this is not just the scrap dealers that have an issue; everybody has got the same fundamental issues. 
 

RT: The Canadian Steel Producers Association has introduced a new "Zero Mercury" Scrap Purchasing Policy. Can you please tell me about the program and how CARI is helping its members address the mercury issue?

LS: CARI’s involvement in Canada’s mercury program goes back to Switch Out. It is still called Switch Out, but it began as a pilot project in the province of Ontario by a group called Pollution Probe. It was a voluntary program started in 2000. They started with about 11 auto recyclers. It is now a national program because the federal government initiated a regulation that required pollution prevention plans from the auto sector and from the steel companies to show how they were going to reduce the amount of mercury that they were putting into the environment.
 

We partnered with the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association and the Canadian Steel Producers Association—those two groups that actually had to create a pollution-prevention plan and send it to the government. Then we also partnered with the Automotive Recyclers of Canada. They are the most significant place that you can find the switches. Most of our members don’t see cars that have switches in them, though some do. We sent out material to let them know what was happening and how they could participate. If they sign up for the program, they get a [container] that they can put the switches into. They are collected periodically and brought in to a single company that holds them here in Ontario.

The difference in Canada [compared with the U.S.] is that we have never had a bounty on the mercury switches. It is done voluntarily by the members. We also are taking the mercury switches in ABS braking system.

When the regulation was put in place for the pollution-prevention plans for the auto and steel industries, they did not want to have to put in mercury measuring equipment to get the baseline testing and all the rest. So it was agreed that this voluntary program, called Switch Out, by actually counting the number of switches taken out across the country and reported on an annual basis would be sufficient to show that we were taking mercury out.

Recently the Canadian Steel Producers Association—and they represent all 13 of the companies in Canada that melt and pour steel—has developed a zero-mercury policy. The companies that buy the steel have said, Don’t give me scrap that has mercury in it.

This is what we have been saying to our members all along: Sooner or later, these guys are going to tell you what to do. They will do their usual checking and audits of different loads, etc. They will know by analysis at some point if there is mercury is the shipments. If you are not playing the game, you are not going to be supplying them.

Now, since it is the very large scrap dealers that service the steel mills, their thrust is onto those scrap dealers, and the major scrap dealers push this requirement down the chain to the guys who supply them.

CARI is very supportive of Switch Out and has been involved since 2000.
 

RT: What other initiatives is CARI working on that you’re particularly excited about?

LS: One of the meetings I am going to [April 18] is with Natural Resources Canada. We have for a couple of years been looking at a Google map system to show domestic recyclers. It is going to be a tool but also promotional for the industry. We see this becoming a complete system and not just for metals—eventually it could have plastics recyclers, rubber recyclers, etc. We’ve started it up with the metals recyclers.

We have got a safety initiative that has been ongoing for quite a while. We work quite closely with ISRI (Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc., Washington, D.C.) on that. We had agreed with ISRI to co-fund a manual for the industry, but in the end it got developed in a different way, and we actually purchased the rights to the ISRI manual and I Canadianized it because we don’t have OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). We have provincial equivalents. Of course there were a few other wrinkles and I had to translate it into French for our Quebec members. We had John Gilstrap, the safety directory of ISRI, come speak at conventions.

Radiation is still an issue in the industry. In fact we have an initiative going with our Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. We have a first meeting taking place in Hamilton [in May]. The goal is to bring the issue back to the fore, to let people know what their obligations are under the act in Canada. Essentially, if you are at a yard and your monitor goes off, you are not permitted to send [the material] back on the road. You have to capture it, call the agency and get it sorted out. [The material] can go back on the road if the proper paperwork is done. We are reinforcing that. In the fall we are probably going to go across to all of our chapters with people from the agency and speak to the members on that.

The other program we’ve got is on unexploded ordinances. Several years ago we actually had a death at a Winnipeg member that was working on ordinances that were supposed to be safe; they weren’t. It changed the protocol for our Department of Defense. So we are trying to go back to all of our members to say, Go out and take a serious look, and if you find anything, here are the guys to call. They will come out and look after it for you, reimburse you for it and deal with it properly. We are very much pushing that.

Radiation and unexploded ordinances are both kind of safety related, but they are specific. They have been around for a while but they tend to come back every now and then. So we are trying to take the initiative here before we have another accident with either one of those issues.