Ontario is changing how it recycles beverage containers. Who will pay for it?

Beverage makers will soon be fully responsible for recycling non-alcoholic drink containers in the province, part of an environmental program called Extended Producer Responsibility. But calling it a “consumer responsibility program” might be more apt.

Thestar.com
Sept. 21, 2023
Patty Winsa

British Columbia has a renowned beverage deposit system.

The first in the world, the system is one of the most comprehensive, accepting nearly all beverage types and all container types, said Susan Collins, the president of the Container Recycling Institute, a non-profit advocacy group in the U.S.

It’s a model that Ontario could emulate as the province downloads full responsibility to beverage producers to run a recycling program -- referred to as an extended producer responsibility program or EPR -- for non-alcoholic drink containers.

A working group is studying deposit systems after the province rejected the beverage industry’s Recycle Everywhere plan, which proposed a one to three cent surcharge on beverages to cover collection and manage recycling.

Fears that the fee would be passed down to retailers, and ultimately consumers, scuttled the plan.

“Retailers balked at both higher costs from producers, and potential backlash from consumers if the fees resulted in higher prices,” according to the Consumers Council of Canada.

But the reality is that a successful deposit system like the one in B.C. could cost consumers here even more.

“It’s interesting, at least on the financial side,” said Collins who has high praise for the deposit system, which has a recovery rate of 77 per cent.

“You could call the B.C. program a ‘consumer responsibility program.’ The consumers pay for all of it.”

Customers pay a ten-cent returnable deposit, as well as a non-refundable container recycling fee, which is anywhere from one to 11 cents when they buy a drink. Unredeemed deposits, together with the fee, cover an annual budget of $135 million.

That is in contrast to deposit redemption systems in Europe and the U.S., where many redemption systems were legislated as antilitter bills.

“In most jurisdictions in the world it is the beverage producers that bear those costs,” said Clarissa Morawski, an authority on deposit systems and the CEO and co-founder of Reloop, an international NGO registered in Brussels and the USA.

“Producers are taking the cost of their obligation and putting it directly on the consumer like a tax and saying we’re just going to charge it separately on the bill.”

Morawski said there’s no indication that container recycling fees are hidden in the price of beverages in Europe or the U.S.
“There has been research done comparing prices in one jurisdiction that has deposit and one jurisdiction that doesn’t,” she said. “And there’s absolutely no clear signal that shows that the prices are higher.”

For years, Ontario has had an extended producer responsibility program, with the producers of products and packaging splitting the costs equally of recycling the contents of curbside blue box programs with municipalities.

Producer responsibility for the blue box is now increasing to 100 per cent, and will be rolled out across the province in the next several years, with beverage producers taking on the responsibility of recycling drink containers.

Ontario has also set targets. Beverage companies have to collect and recycle or refill 75 per cent of their non-alcoholic empties by 2026 and 80 per cent by 2030.

In response, the beverage industry announced its Recycle Everywhere program for Ontario, which had an estimated $84 million dollar annual budget that it said would be covered by the container surcharges.

The money would go toward new recycling bins for public spaces, a public-relations campaign to encourage recycling and the collection of empty beverage containers from blue bins or the household Blue Box.

But in July, the Canadian Beverage Container Recycling Association, which would have run the program on behalf of producers, decided to halt plans for Recycle Everywhere.

There was an outcry over the fees and the non-profit group, Environmental Defence, said the association failed to lay out “a viable path to achieve the 80-per-cent target by 2030,” in an emailed statement.

The responsibility for beverage container recycling in Ontario has now been taken up by Circular Materials, another industry group, but it’s not clear if that group will run the province’s deposit system should the province get one.

What is clear, however, is that deposit redemption systems work.

In Europe, where consumers can conveniently return empties to retailers who have stations that count the containers and tabulate the redemption, or reverse vending machines, the recovery rate is as high as 90 per cent.

More than two dozen EU countries have redemption programs, although Morawski said France, Spain and Italy are not yet on board.

In B.C., the program is successful in part because it accepts anything from pop cans, water bottles, juice containers and even milk cartons, which many programs don’t cover.

Redemptions can be made through retailers, more than 160 Return-It depots, as well as unmanned shipping containers that were introduced during the pandemic.

Run by Encorp Pacific, a not-for-profit product stewardship corporation, the redemption program works collaboratively with Recycle B.C. -- the industry group responsible for curbside collection -- providing funding for the proportion of beverage containers that aren’t redeemed and end up in the Blue Box.

“Everything that we collect, either at the depot, through the curbside, through our unmanned shipping containers, through retail -- we pick it up,” said Cindy Coutts, the CEO of Encorp Pacific.

“And we consolidate it and densify it. And we choose the ultimate vendors,” said Coutts. “So we do the downstream accountability to make sure that we know that all of those materials are being recycled properly.”

Alberta has a similar redemption system.

Manitoba, though, has the same Recycle Everywhere program that was floated here.

Run by the Canadian Beverage Container Recycling Association (CBCRA), consumers are charged a one to three cent container recycling fee.

The CBCRA said it has a recovery rate of 71 per cent, relying on audits of all recycled material to determine the proportion of recovered beverages.
In 2018, however, the transparency of those claims came into question when the province was dropped from a consulting report that analyzes beverage container collection and costs in Canada.

“After a series of correspondence with the producer responsibility organization that provides nonalcohol beverage container collection rates for Manitoba, we were unable to receive data suitable for entry into our report,” according to CM Consulting in it’s Who Pays What report from 2018. Morawski owns CM Consulting.

The Manitoba program was dropped “due to lack of transparency, granularity and methods and analysis behind the rate,” according to the report.

The province was omitted again from the latest report in 2020 for the same reason.

The Canadian Beverage Container Recycling Association did not respond to a request from the Star for an interview.

Ontario, in comparison, recovers about 45 per cent of empty drink containers through curbside recycling programs, said Collins, who doesn’t believe

Ontario can reach its goal of 80 per cent without a deposit redemption scheme.

“The existing curbside blue box program has been in place for decades, and is nowhere near those high rates,” said Collins.

Plus, she said, the blue box system only covers residential materials, not industrial, commercial and institutional.

“Deposit programs are comprehensive,” said Collins. “About 30-50 per cent of beverage containers are generated outside of the home.”

Whether Ontarians will be the ones to pay for the redemption program, if there is one, is up in the air.

“I think that it’s unlikely that you’ll get a deposit return system that doesn’t have a container recycling fee,” said Morawski.

Collins, however, thinks it’s fair that producers and consumers foot the bill.

“With (deposit redemption systems), the people who benefit from the products, producers and consumers, are the ones who pay for end-of-life,” said Collins.

“Most people think this is more fair than having the end-of-life management of those products paid for by general taxes.”

What are empty drink containers good for?

Aluminum cans: They can be recycled and back on the shelf within six weeks, taking 95 per cent less energy to make from recycled aluminum than from brand new material.

Plastic bottles: Become new bottles and buckets using about a third less energy than manufacturing new plastic.

Glass: Made into materials such as fibreglass insulation and sandblasting material.

Non-aluminium cans: Usually steel, they can be made into hundreds of products such as rebar and car parts.

Drink boxes/cartons: Polycoat containers are hydra-pulped and become tissue paper and cardboard boxes.

Refillable glass bottles: Beer bottles are reused an average of 15 times. At the end of the bottle’s life cycle, it is crushed and recycled into new glass bottles.