Privatizing Recycling

A PRODUCER-RESPONSIBILITY APPROACH. "We are proceeding with a producer-responsibility approach to recycling in Manitoba," says Green Manitoba Director Doug Smith. "We are going to be obligating industry to fund and run programs to look after end-of-life materials."

Smith says industry groups will be responsible for tires, electronics, portions of the curbside blue-box program, which will be expanded to include hazardous household wastes such as paint and other materials. "Individual working groups will be developed for each stream to initiate program proposals to be forwarded to Green Manitoba," he says. "We will review the plans and determine whether or not to approve them."

Smith says that Green Manitoba has an ambitious time line. All four industry groups are expected to have recycling programs approved and in operation within 18 months.

"Canada’s publicly led recycling programs are not financially sustainable," Smith says. He says that he attended a provincial product responsibility conference in Calgary in mid-March and found most other provinces were interested in what Green Manitoba was doing.

"I was also at a recycling conference in Europe recently and heard the same concerns," Smith says. "Many European countries are also moving in this direction."

GOING ELECTRONIC. Where electronics recycling is concerned, the western prairie province of Alberta thus far has Canada’s first such program, which was launched in October of 2004.

"We have established over 100 collection sites—some of them near landfills—throughout the province (which has a population of about 3 million) for electronic waste," says Kari Veno, communications manager for the non-profit Alberta Recycling Management Authority (ARMA), which administers the program.

"We have five qualified recyclers driving around picking up the used computer equipment, televisions and other materials and separating them into their glass, metal and plastic components," she says.

To pay for collection, transportation and recycling of end-of-life electronics, the provincial government instituted a new environmental fee beginning Feb. 1, 2005, on the purchase price of all new electronics products sold in the province. Veno reports that the fee for laptop computers, electronic notebooks and desktop printers is $5; CPUs carry a fee of $10; desktop computer monitors, $12; 19-inch to 29-inch televisions, $25; 30-inch to 45-inch televisions, $35; and televisions with screens larger than 45 inches carry a fee of $45.

According to information available on ARMA’s Web site, the program has recovered more than 35,000 televisions, 76,000 monitors, 75,500 computers and 40,000 printers within Alberta in the first 18 months.

Veno reports that the public and media response to the new program has generally been positive. She says that Saskatchewan (the province between Alberta and Manitoba) will soon have a similar obsolete electronics recovery program in operation, with British Columbia—Canada’s Pacific Coast province—and the smaller East Coast province of Nova Scotia following suit.

RESIDENTIAL COLLECTION. In Ontario, Manitoba’s eastern neighbor and Canada’s largest province, the major recycling news this year is the grand opening in mid-March of the largest integrated recycling plant in Canada in the Peel region, which covers the western part of the Greater Toronto area. The new facility has a processing capacity of 130,000 metric tons per year. It also includes a transfer station that can handle 100,000 metric tons per year. A compost section that will be capable of handling 60,000 metric tons of compost is expected to be open in May or June.

"We will be launching a kitchen organic collection program in the spring of 2007," says Dave Gordon, director of planning for the Peel region.

Waste Management of Canada Corp. designed and built the new facility and also has a five-year operating contract.

Sarah Mills, communications director for the Recycling Council of Ontario, says that Ontario’s two-year-old province-wide blue-box program continues to be controversial. "The program costs considerably more than the original cost estimates, and the cost is higher still this year," she says. "The brand owners are quite distressed."

Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO)—a partnership among industry, municipalities, the province and non-governmental organizations that was established in June 2002 through the previous provincial government’s new Waste Diversion Act—runs the program. WDO is charged with developing, funding and implementing waste diversion programs for materials designated by the Minister of the Environment. Its first mission was to develop a sustainable funding plan for the blue-box program by obligating brand owners whose packaging ends up in the blue box to pay for half of the operating costs for collection and processing to municipalities.

In addition to the WDO, the government of Ontario has established Stewardship Ontario, which has the authority to set and to collect fees from industries whose materials, such as glass, metal, paper and plastics, are collected in the blue-box program. The provincial Environment Ministry is also supposed to be developing used tire, oil and electronics recycling programs, Mills notes, but there have been no announcements as to when these additional programs will begin.

METAL MARKETS. Canadian metals recyclers are waiting to see what changes, if any, Canada’s new Conservative government will be introducing that might effect the industry. "We have been trying for years to get the government to accept the fundamental fact that the recycling industry is not just about waste," says Len Shaw, executive director of CARI (Canadian Association of Recycling Industries). "It should be encouraged as a sustainable development industry."