Environmental Defence renews call for plastic bottle deposit return system
Ontario lagging behind other provinces, countries.

TheStar.com
Sept. 19, 2017
Ainslie Cruickshank

As Scotland moves to implement a deposit return system that would include plastic bottles, Environmental Defence is renewing its call for Ontario to play catch up and do the same.

“This is a proven best practice, it’s been applied in every province except for Manitoba and Ontario, it’s applied across the world, and we know it can get 80 per cent (recycling rate),” said Keith Brooks, the organization’s programs director.

“Ontarians use roughly three billion single use plastic bottles every year, but only half of those bottles end up getting recycled. The other 1.5 billion end up either in landfills or in the environment as litter,” he said, noting Ontario has the worst recycling rate in the country.

“Obviously it’s a huge problem.”

While alcohol beverage containers have been collected through Ontario’s deposit return system since 2007, non-alcohol beverage containers are not included in the program.

They can be recycled through Blue Box programs, but Brooks said only half actually are.

A spokesperson for Ontario’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change said the province will build on the Blue Box program as it implements a new producer responsibility framework outlined in legislation passed last summer, which will require producers to take full responsibility for their products and packaging.

Though Brooks said the extended producer responsibility model is “good in principle,” he’s concerned the province is moving too slowly on implementation.

Meanwhile the deposit return system is seeing high rates of recovery.

Ontario’s program charges and returns a bottle deposit of 10 or 20 cents depending on the size of the container. It’s run through The Beer Store alongside the company’s own deposit return system, which has been operating since 1927.

In 2016 The Beer Store reported collecting 88 per cent of all containers under its own program and 79 per cent of all containers under Ontario’s program.

Similar success rates are seen in other provinces with broader systems.

In British Columbia, where a deposit return system accepts non-alcohol containers like pop cans and plastic water bottles, more than 75 per cent of plastic water bottles sold are returned. A similar program in Alberta reports an overall return rate of 86 per cent.

The Canadian Beverage Association, however, says a deposit return system is the wrong approach.

In a statement Jim Goetz, the association’s president, noted its members are a “proud partner” in the Blue Box program, which he said has been successful because of its “convenience” for residents.

“To build on the success of the Blue Box program, a far better and more convenient option would be investing in more out-of-home and multi-residential recycling infrastructure, like the beverage industry has done in Manitoba through the Canadian Beverage Container Recycling Association,” Goetz said.

But Brooks raised concern that the industries’ hesitation is about expense not the success of deposit return systems.

“That’s not really an acceptable argument from our perspective,” he said.

“We can’t continue to litter in this way, not in this day and age, not with plastic that we know now is accumulating in the environment in a really bad way — like, a plastic bottle that you buy today is still going to be around a thousand years from now. It does not break down.”