Putting out the garbage has become a complicated business for residents of Durham Region, a large collection of suburban and rural municipalities on the eastern edge of Metro Toronto.
For many years, we put our garbage cans at curbside once a week, along with Blue Boxes that contained a limited assortment of recyclables, such as newsprint, glass and tin.
Under the new regime, which went into effect July 1, we now collect all table scraps in green composting containers. These and a greatly expanded list of recyclables in Blue Boxes are collected weekly. All other refuse is picked up bi-weekly, but there is a four-bag limit and extras will cost you.
The Durham program is part of a provincewide effort to cut the volume of waste going to landfills sites through the application of the three Rs - recycle, re-use and reduce.
In June 2004, the Ministry of the Environment set a goal of diverting 60 per cent of Ontario's waste from disposal by the end of 2008 - up from 28 per cent when the policy was announced. Households and businesses were producing 12 million tonnes annually. To meet the target, 7.2 million tonnes, or about 600,000 truckloads, must go elsewhere.
Municipalities are responsible for making this happen and most are betting they can do it through recycling. Some experts have their doubts. The problem, they say, is that plastic products, mostly packaging, represent such a large chunk of household waste when measured by volume as opposed to weight.
"Recycling plastic just doesn't make sense," says John Jackson, who teaches waste management at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. "It turns out lousy products."
Aluminum cans, he points out, can be shipped to a smelter, melted down and turned back into the same product because they contain a single ingredient - aluminum. Plastic containers are more complex. A single container may include several types of plastic, along with additives to enhance the strength or give it colour, and the additives are often toxic.
"In order to control the quality of a product, you need to know the exact proportions of each type of plastic you're using, but most containers have a blend," Jackson says. "You can't get a consistent product when you mix plastics. All you can do is turn this type of waste into low-value products like fenceposts and park benches."
So, what do you do once you've saturated the market for plastic fenceposts and picnic tables? The industry says we should burn it. "In nations with energy-recovery plants, plastic bottles and containers become supplementary fuel to fire boilers in electrical generating or district heating plants," says an entry on the website of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association. "Plastic waste contributes valuable fuel to the incineration process, helping to maintain the high combustion temperatures required to eliminate harmful emissions. And plastics do not emit harmful toxins into the atmosphere when burned in state-of-the-art incinerators."
Jackson has another idea.
He thinks we should use less plastic and he thinks a lot of Canadians would agree. "When homeowners look at their garbage it's mainly plastic packaging," he says. "You buy a toy for your kid and it comes in a plastic container, which you throw out the moment you open it. There's no value to the consumer in that."
It is no exaggeration to say that in some retail outlets, and in certain departments of big-box stores, there is more plastic on the shelves than product.
An iPod is thin as a wafer and will fit in the palm of your hand, yet some retailers sell them in plastic packages that measure about 6"x10". Sony Walkman's are now about the size of a stopwatch, yet they also come in unnecessarily large packages.
This is marketing, pure and simple. Manufacturers realize that a small product that comes in a small package but costs a lot of money is a tough sell. So they put it in a big package, even if that plastic is destined to wind up in the local dump or will be used to make fenceposts.
Retailing is rife with such wasteful practices.
How about patio mats that come wrapped in plastic? Or plastic grocery bags that go from the checkout counter to the trunk of the car to the kitchen and into the garbage?
Municipalities can no longer accept such waste because the landfills are full, or nearly so and it's next to impossible to build new ones.
They're now forcing change on homeowners. Likewise, manufacturers and retailers are going to have to rethink the way they package and sell their goods. If they don't do it voluntarily, governments will likely use the big sticks of legislation and regulation to force change on them.
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(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
