Ontario’s recycling woes

The recycling system Ontario can’t manage batteries, and there’s no reason to think it will do any better with all those blue boxes.

Thestar.com
Nov. 23, 2022

The Ontario government says the future of its recycling programs, and by extension a healthier environment, rests on motivating the business sector to do better.

In that, the province has joined a growing global movement to make companies financially responsible for the disposal of their products and packaging. It’s designed to given them a bottom-line incentive to reduce how much they produce in the first place, and make the rest of it easier and cheaper to recycle into new products.

Ontario’s recycling regulator describes this theory of extended producer responsibility as “a circular economy today for a waste-free tomorrow.”

But what happens if the province’s rules and regulations are not strong enough to hold producers responsible?

That’s the question brought to mind by the serious problems with Ontario’s battery recycling program uncovered by the Star’s Richard Warnica.

A business feud has left Ontario with fewer venues for recycling this particular hazardous waste, and Premier Doug Ford’s government has not given its own regulator the powers it needs to fix the mess.

The Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority is supposed to be in charge of recycling but right now it doesn’t even know where most of the used batteries collected in Ontario are going. The concerns that raises go well beyond batteries.

Over the last two and half years, the RPRA has been taking over responsibility for recycling programs from batteries to electrical waste, including computers and televisions, to household hazardous waste, such as paint. Starting next summer, it will begin to oversee Ontario’s biggest and most important recycling program -- the municipal blue box system.

Critics, which include environmentalists and recycling and waste industry experts, have long argued that Ontario’s targets for collection are not high enough to keep materials out of landfills, which are fast running out of space, or spur the kind of business innovation a true circular economy would require. They have also argued that the regulator is being given too few tools to verify what’s happening and enforce compliance.

Those aren’t hypothetical concerns anymore. It’s all playing out with batteries, one of the first programs to move to Ontario’s new extended producer responsibility regime.

The recycling targets are so low, battery producers aren’t being required to even match the performance levels achieved in 2017 under the old program until 2025. That’s all but certain to mean more batteries will be dumped in landfills where they can leach chemicals into the groundwater.

And if Ontario’s recycling system can’t be relied on to get a single item like batteries right, what confidence can there be that it will do better with the larger and more complex blue box system?

As one waste industry expert put it to Warnica: “Different types of recyclers are looking at this and saying, if there’s no teeth to address this issue, then there’s going to be no teeth to address anything else that’s happening.”

Earlier this year, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, touted its progress in moving the blue box towards a full extended producer responsibility model, rather than the current system, where municipalities run it and pay half the costs.

“Ontario will soon be home to a leading blue box service that will better serve the taxpayer, have the highest waste diversion targets in North America, and promote innovations in recycling technologies and use of recycled materials,” stated the ministry.

To make that happen, the province needs to take further steps. Ontario needs progressive and escalating recycling targets. It needs a regulator with robust enough to hold industry to account, and that should include the power to issue fines to companies that break the rules.

The system the Ford government has put in place so far isn’t strong enough to manage batteries, and there’s no reason to think it will do any better with all those blue boxes overflowing with paper, plastics and packaging.