Liberals to phase out eco fees in Ontario

Queen’s Park is phasing out eco-fees on consumer electronics and other products and radically revamping waste diversion programs to force manufacturers to package less.

Thestar.com
Nov. 26, 2015
By Robert Benzie

Queen’s Park is phasing out eco fees on consumer electronics and other products and radically revamping waste diversion programs to force manufacturers to package less, the Star has learned.

Environment and Climate Change Minister Glen Murray is to introduce sweeping new legislation Thursday that will ultimately eliminate Waste Diversion Ontario, the controversial industry-run agency overseeing provincial recycling programs.

Murray’s bill, the Waste-Free Ontario Act, is the framework for “building the circular economy” in the province, government sources said Wednesday.

“A shift to a circular economy encourages businesses to design long-lasting, reusable and easily recyclable products,” according to a 36-page draft document outlining the new approach.

“Transitioning to this type of economy requires a change in the way we think about waste, in how products and packaging are designed to reduce waste, and in how they are managed to maximize resource recovery.”

Currently, consumers pay an “environmental handling fee” on new electronics to cover the eventual cost of refurbishing or recycling them.

But that eco fee, which ranges from 7 cents for a cellphone to $39.50 for a big-screen television, is effectively set by industry cartels so shoppers must pay the levy even if it costs less to recycle a product.

Under the new model, which will likely not take effect for the next two to four years as the government winds down the existing system, manufacturers will have to include recycling fees in a product’s price-tag so it will no longer appear like a tax on the receipt.

Also eventually being shipped to the dump is the Ontario Tire Stewardship, which charges anywhere from $4.25 per passenger car tire to a staggering $1,311.24 to recycle a large off-road tire.

The government wants to eliminate such industry-funded organizations - or

“stewards” - because having them charge a disposal fee “reduces incentives for producers to make improvements to products and packaging design that would reduce waste or to devise innovative ways to recover their products and packaging at the end of life.”

Instead, such costs, which companies would presumably want to lower in order to be competitive, would be incorporated into the retail price.

Ontario, which has one of the worst recycling rates in Canada, has long had a stagnant waste-diversion rate of about 25 per cent, which Murray’s department believes is hurting the economy.

That’s because recycling generates much more employment than disposal, with every 1,000 tonnes of recycled waste creating the equivalent of seven jobs.

At the same time, five per cent of Ontario’s greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change, come from waste - mostly in the form of methane in landfill sites.

While municipal Blue Box programs are largely successful, keeping out two-thirds of all residential printed paper and packaging from landfills, only 14 per cent of such waste from industrial, commercial, and institutional sectors is diverted.

Murray’s legislation, which will likely pass next spring, would pave the way toward improving the Blue Box system so that mattresses and carpets could one day be recycled through the program.

“The vision for Ontario is one where waste is seen as a resource that can be recovered, reused and reintegrated into the economy to achieve a circular economy,” said the draft document.

But with an election set for spring 2018, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals will be under pressure to have the politically charged issue of eco fees dead and buried.

In 2013, Wynne’s then-minority government introduced legislation to wind them down, but it died on the order paper before the June 2014 election.

Former premier Dalton McGuinty - and Ontario consumers - were blindsided when the industry “stewardship” organizations slapped eco fees on thousands of household products on July 1, 2010, the same day the 13 per cent harmonized sales tax was introduced.

Fearing a tax rebellion, McGuinty’s Grits scrapped those levies of up to $6.66 per item within three weeks of Stewardship Ontario imposing the charges.