The recycling crisis sweeping Canada has been slow to bury Okotoks, with 95 per cent of recyclables received through the Eco Centre being processed or sold to buyers, but future revenue is at risk.
“We saw a decline in revenue last year,” said Paul Lyons, waste services manager. “The whole management team will be looking at how we manage that facility to ensure that there is no adverse impact on the product that’s coming in to be recycled, nor any adverse negative impact on our residents or our ratepayers.”
Canada’s trash increasingly has nowhere left to go after China and other countries have put their foot down on receiving our garbage, leaving many municipalities struggling to sell recyclable plastic in an oversaturated market.
Enacted in 2018, China’s “National Sword” policy was the catalyst for the crisis—it bans 24 types of solid waste, including various plastics and unsorted mixed papers, while setting much stricter contamination standards. The policy came from China’s “Green Fence” policy to reduce contamination levels in recycling shipments to curtail the use of the country as a trash dump.
China’s strict contamination standards essentially ban importing foreign recycling, leaving Canada with little infrastructure or policy to address the situation.
“The greatest impact that the Town is facing, or the eco centre facility, is lower commodity price,” said Lyons. “Currently we have not experienced any issue in moving the material that is collected at the eco centre, however it is at a greatly reduced price.
“Nothing we are sending out right now is going to landfill. Right now, we’re able to manage 95 per cent of what is coming through.”
Previous figures from a study by Deloitte for Environment and Climate Change Canada showed Canada recycled only nine per cent of 3.2 million tonnes of plastic waste generated each year, but that number included the recyclables shipped to Asia.
As much as 2.8 million tonnes of plastic finds its home in Canadian landfills each year, according to the Deloitte study. In 2016, Canada sent $7.8 billion in plastics to landfills.
The need for a circular economy
The crisis goes back to the classic Three R’s—reduce, reuse, and recycle—and the overreliance on recycling and low standards for production, said Lyons.“I think that we need to shift some of our focus on reducing what we are producing,” he said. “We could stress that some more, without sounding like we’re controlling what people consume. There’s a fundamental piece to the problem and that is there is a lot of challenge for recyclers to recycle a lot of the material that is being produced.”
One of the key solutions to the crisis is believed to be Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which puts the responsibility of plastic packaging on the producers from the time of production through to the end of its life and disposal instead of consumer’s bearing that cost.
Coun. Tanya Thorn put forward a notice of motion in February for the Town to join with other municipalities in asking the province to switch to an EPR program. The Cities of Calgary and Edmonton with Alberta Recycling will be bringing back a report in September on the next steps a proposed implementation of EPR in the province.
“Recycling is something that we need to do, I think as a society it is the right thing to do, but we need to be looking at what the effectiveness of those recycling programs are,” said Thorn. “We need to change that on its head, and that’s partly why (EPR) is the first step in that process.”
Thorn also questioned the application of the Three R’s.
“We’re really weak in my opinion on reduce and reuse. We need to really think about the products that we buy and the packaging that comes with it,” she said.
Federal regulations that create incentives for a reuse market for producers would benefit the situation, said Thorn, but she stressed the consumer end as well.
“A great thing that Okotoks is doing is (…) our Repair Cafés that bring us back down to that whole reuse concept of trying to repair something so it continues to have a lifecycle” she said. “That’s the piece we need to get to with plastics, which is creating that circular economy where it continues to feed itself through the program.
“Right now it doesn’t.”
The power of the consumer
“While (EPR) is more of a provincial policy, as consumers we can also refuse to accept some types of packaging that we know is not recyclable,” said Lyons. “It comes back to using knowledge, using our power of refusal, in order to ensure that these programs are reasonably successful. It’s one of the greatest contributions.“If we refuse to accept something that we know isn’t recyclable then we will avoid purchasing some of those so that they don’t get into our recycling stream. It keeps our material clean.”
A key to recycling success in Okotoks is the functioning of the eco centre, said Lyons. He credits the limited residue to residents coming in for information, and the volunteers and staff that help sort materials and educate the community.
Working with the buyers directly, Lyons is able to know what they want and how the eco centre can help manage that accordingly to ensure that materials are being ‘managed in the best possible way’ despite the crisis.
“I think what we have done as a Town is work with our residents to ensure that the quality of the material coming in is exactly what is required, and I think our residents have been doing that,” he said. “We want our residents to be successful and we provide them with the information to be successful.”
As a whole, Lyons said the material coming into the centre is good quality, and that residents should keep doing what they are doing.
To help as a consumer, he said an aspect of recycling efficiency is cleaning recyclables correctly, as all of the material in the eco centre has to be clean and dry in order to process it.
He also stressed being aware of what is recyclable and what is not—a common offender being plastic cutlery and straws, which are not recyclable under any current program.
Lyons suggested residents view the online Town of Okotoks waste search tool called, Waste Wizard, or download the Waste Wizard app, which allows you to search an item and see which bin to out it in.
