Improving Canada’s recycled output will take ‘radical changes’

An analysis of Canada’s plastics industry shows the industry producing plastic dwarfs the industry trying to have it recycled. 

The report, completed by consulting firms Deloitte and ChemInfo Services, was commissioned by Environment and Climate Change Canada to guide its plan to cut the country’s plastics waste to zero.

It found the plastics-manufacturing industry is a significant economic driver in Canada, worth $35 billion in sales of resins and plastic manufactured goods in 2017, and supporting about 93,000 jobs across more than 1,900 companies.

By comparison, there were fewer than a dozen recycling companies, employing about 500 people and generating about $350 million in revenue.

In 2016, 3.3 million tonnes of plastic ended up in the trash, 12 times the amount of plastic that was recycled. A small amount of plastics are burned for energy at five Canadian waste-to-energy plants. Almost 90 per cent of the plastic that is recycled in Canada is from packaging.

It’s cheaper and easier to produce new plastic

Generally, the analysis says, it is cheaper and easier to produce new plastic, use it and then throw it away than it is to recycle, reuse or repair it. The voluntary standards for contents of plastic products, and additives like glues and labels, mean there is a lack of consistency in the plastic materials available for recycling. That in turn makes them more expensive to recycle.

Canada also has very little demand for recycled plastic, which is why so much plastic has been shipped overseas. But the markets for recycled plastic are falling apart all over the world, leading shipments of Canadian plastics to be dumped in landfills or burn piles on foreign soil as well.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says Canada is throwing out billions of dollars of plastic every year and is working on a plan to have Canadians reuse or recycle all plastics or burn them for energy within 20 years. That plan is supposed to be unveiled this month.

“We’re literally throwing in the garbage, $120 (billion) to $150 billion in value,” she said last week. “We can do a lot better.”

Radical changes are required

The Deloitte report shows getting to zero plastic waste will require “radical changes” in consumer behaviour, an explosion in the number of recycling facilities in Canada, investments in recycling technology, and a litany of government policies such as landfill taxes or requiring products to include a certain proportion of recycled material. Requiring more recycled content would help create market demand in Canada for recycled plastic, regardless of the cost of new plastic.

The report suggests Canada could get to the point where 90 percent of plastic avoids landfill by 2030 with an investment of between $4.3 billion and $8.6 billion, the addition of 167 new sorting and recycling facilities, a lot of government regulation and consumer willpower. That would increase revenues in the recycling industry from $500 million to $3 billion, and create 42,000 new direct and indirect jobs.

Report avoids recommendations on cutting down on plastic use

Sarah King, head of the oceans-and-plastic program for Greenpeace Canada, said the report is so focused on increasing recycling it avoids almost any discussion of cutting down how much plastic we use in the first place.

King said her fear is that Canada is not having the hard conversation about banning certain plastic products entirely — everything from plastic grocery bags and black garbage bags to plastic cups and take-out containers. Several municipalities in Canada are looking at such bans and the whole province of Prince Edward Island is set to ban plastic grocery bags on July 1, 2019.

King said the leadership has to come from Ottawa.

“Ultimately we want to move towards a ban on all non-essential plastics,” she said.

Canadians produce so much plastic that recycling just can’t handle the volume and “the only way to address an endless flowing tap is to turn it off,” she said.

She also is concerned that Deloitte’s zero-plastic-garbage outline includes burning one-fifth of plastic waste for energy. Burning facilities are less picky about what is in the plastic they are taking than recyclers are, which reduces the burden on consumers to properly sort their items and allows for a wider variety of items to be collected.

But King said, burning plastic produces ash and other toxic pollutants along with any energy.

FEATURED IMAGE: Plastic water bottles are pictured in a blue box recycle bin in North Vancouver, B.C. on May 7, 2019. Photo by Jonathan Hayward, The Canadian Press.

By Mia Rabson, in News, Politics, Canada’s National Observer

June 5, 2019

Improving Canada’s recycling output will take ‘radical changes’: report

SEE ALSO: https://oceanchampions.ca/canadas-recycling-industry-broken/

Is Canada’s recycling industry broken?

At the Loraas recycling plant in Saskatoon, 650 bales of worthless plastic pile up outside. Among the towers of packaging: a crumpled parmesan cheese container, a spray bottle of tile cleaner and a tub of garlic mayo.

“This material here is very hard to move,” said Dale Schmidt, manager of Loraas Recycle. “Currently, it moves at a negative value and it only moves once in a while. We’re having a real hard time getting this stuff to market.”

What once could be sold for profit now costs money to haul away, and the notion that Canadians are saving the planet by putting things in a blue bin is proving to be a delusion.

The recycling industry in Canada is having its moment of reckoning.

“It’s a watershed moment. We have to come clean, we have to be honest, we have to get back to truth, to reality with these programs,” said Lorenzo Donini, director of government affairs and municipal relationships for GFL Environmental in Western Canada.

In a months-long investigation, Global News spoke with dozens of communities, companies and industry leaders across the country about the mounting challenges faced by Canada’s recycling industry. The result is dire: with few exceptions, more recycling is being sent to landfill, fewer items are being accepted in the blue bin and the financial toll of running these programs has become a burden for some municipalities.

While recycling has never been a money-making venture, cities and recycling companies rely on the revenue from the products they collect at the curb — things like plastic, paper, aluminum and cardboard — to offset the cost of sorting and processing.

Everything had a value — for a time.

Now, commodity prices have crashed. Some products have no buyers, and recyclers are paying to get rid of some things.

“Everyone has to come to the table and basically get real now,” Donini said.

“If we don’t, we will keep going towards a cliff that we go off of that totally erodes all public trust in the program.”

What put Canada in this position was its dependency on China.

“It became a drug almost for this country — and in North America — that ‘Oh, China will take it. China will take it,’” Schmidt said.

For years, Canada shipped roughly half of its recycling exports to China with the belief it was all being transformed on the other side of the Pacific.  

“It’s since come to light that, in fact, what they were doing was mining out the valuable materials, and they were, in large part, burning the low-valuable materials,” Donini said.

But at the start of 2018, China declared it didn’t want to be a dumping ground anymore, banning 24 types of waste, including certain types of plastic and paper. Any material that is still accepted has to be of the highest quality, meaning the country won’t take dirty pizza boxes and leftover shreds of cheap plastic.

Other Asian countries have tried to fill the void. From 2016 to 2018, a 98 per cent drop in Canadian plastic exports to China was countered by a more than 1,000 per cent increase in exports to Malaysia. But Malaysia couldn’t handle the flood of materials and, in October 2018, banned plastic imports as well. India did the same. Vietnam imposed restrictions. So did Taiwan.

The drug that was China was gone. The message from the rest of Asia was clear: we don’t want your trash.

“Now, we’re going through withdrawal from that drug,” Schmidt said.

 

Withdrawal has been predictably unpleasant.

The North American supply of recycling — things like paper, cardboard and plastic — has far exceeded demand, and for months, cities scrambled to find new buyers.

In Cowansville, Que., a recycling facility went bankrupt. The Quebec government responded with a $13-million bailout for the industry and a pledge of another $100 million in the 2019 budget.

In the U.S., some towns have resorted to burning their recycling and even cancelled recycling programs altogether.

While much has improved since the initial shock in Canada, the new reality is dreary.

“The problem is in North America itself. We don’t have enough mills to fully process the material that we’ve got,” Schmidt said.

The fallout is that more recycling is ending up in landfills than at any time in recent memory. It’s measured by something that’s called the residual rate — the leftover. The residual rate tallies how much of the recycling a plant receives actually ends up being trash.

“(At) a good plant, the rule of thumb was that if you could keep your residual rate to eight to 10 per cent … that was a good measure,” Donini said. “Now, you’re looking at more of a 25 percent residual rate if you’re doing well … I’ve heard of residual rates as high as 40  percent.”

The City of Toronto’s residual rate was 22 per cent in 2015. Today, it’s hovering around 30 percent.

“We need a very high-quality standard of material to be able to move at a good value so, ultimately, some materials are removed from the system and end up as garbage,” said Matt Keliher, general manager of solid waste management services for the City of Toronto.

Instead of landfilling products at the end of processing, some cities have simply told residents they will accept fewer items to start with — a move contrary to the ethos of recycling.

The City of St. Albert, north of Edmonton, stopped taking five types of packaging last November.

We wanted to make sure that the items that we collected in our blue bags were able to be recycled to be made into new products,” said Olivia Kwok, the city’s supervisor of waste and diversion programs.

Items no longer accepted for curbside recycling include glass bottles, single-use cups such as coffee and yogurt cups, plastic clamshell packaging – the type used for berries and pastries, chip cans and non-deposit Tetra Pak containers, which are commonly used for soup and broth packaging.

“Those are items that go to the garbage,” Kwok said.

At the Bluewater Recycling Association plant near London, Ont., milk cartons, aluminum pie plates, aluminum food cans and small yogurt cups are no longer accepted.

“Every resident wants to do more, not less, and we share their frustration. We’d love nothing more (than) to come out and say, ‘Hey, we can accept these materials,” said president Francis Veilleux. “But the fact is today we’ve gone just a little bit too far. We need to take a step back, refocus on the acceptable materials, and let’s do those right and make sure they get marketed.”

Determined not to send his products to a landfill, Schmidt of Loraas Recycle in Saskatoon was paying for someone to take his plastic film. “Then, finally, that company closed … and the market for plastic film or low-density polyethylene totally collapsed,” he explained.

Without a buyer to take it, plastic film had to be cut from Loraas’ recycling program. Now, it goes straight to the landfill.

EFS-plastics, one of the few processing plants that accepts plastic film in Canada, is turning down multiple requests a week from recyclers and municipalities across North America desperate to offload their product.

“It’s purely a matter of capacity that we can’t do it for them,” said Eadaoin Quinn, director of business development and procurement for the company, which is located outside of Stratford, Ont. The EFS-plastics plant is taking all that it can, but it simply can’t absorb the world’s excess supply. It’s a huge problem.”

The crossroads where the recycling industry finds itself may hold its biggest test to date: how to find a new way forward and, perhaps, a new mantra — recover, reinvigorate and reinvent.

“I think there is nothing about this situation that can’t be salvaged. But it does need some course correction,” said Donini of GFL, optimistically at first. But then he warns, “If we don’t make these changes, we are going to start flirting with real disaster.”

The losing economics of recycling: Canada’s green industry is deep in the red

At the Bluewater Recycling Association plant outside of London, Ont., an aluminum pop can is the most precious item they receive. It’s worth more than paper. More than plastic. More than cardboard.

Selling these products is how recyclers make a profit — and aluminum is the moneymaker. Though it only makes up two percent of everything that’s trucked into the Bluewater plant, the metal is worth 25 percent of the company’s revenue. And yet, even aluminum isn’t immune to an industry whose profits are plunging.

“Last year this time, we were selling it for about $1,900 a tonne,” said Bluewater Recycling Association president Francis Veilleux. “This year, it’s closer to $1,300 to $1,400 a tonne.”

After China stopped accepting much of the world’s recycling at the start of 2018, the market was flooded with product. The dwindling number of buyers who are left demand only the highest-quality material — and at a fraction of the cost. Only two plants still accept Veilleux’s aluminum. Aluminum pie plates and cat food tins are no longer accepted. Just pop cans and beer cans.

In today’s bleak new recycling reality, the price of commodities — like paper, plastic and glass — has tanked.

Some items, like cheap plastic, don’t even have buyers anymore. Recyclers are having to pay to get rid of them. And while recycling was never a money-making venture, the business model was feasible.

Now, for some, it’s a burden.

“Garbage and recycling is the number 1 rising cost that municipalities are facing right now. Higher than police or ambulance or medical or anything else,” said Amanda O’Neill, director of the West Yellowhead Waste Resource Authority, which handles recycling for 20 rural municipalities in midwestern Saskatchewan. “The costs are going up and up exponentially.”

In Ontario alone, the average market price for mixed paper fell 110 percent from August 2017 to January 2019. The values of newspaper and cardboard dropped 50 per cent each. Film plastic — the kind used in shopping bags — dropped 53 per cent.

Toronto has lost millions in revenue. “We’re looking at a between $8-million and $9-million hit last year with our lost revenue,” said Matt Keliher, general manager of solid waste management services for the City of Toronto.

The sharp drop in profits has put municipalities at a crossroads: raise taxes or cut programs.

Matt Keliher, general manager of solid waste management services for the City of Toronto

Matt Keliher, general manager of solid waste management services for the City of Toronto, Global News

In Kawartha Lakes, Ont., where there’s no appetite for a tax increase, the city has backed away from teaching kids the virtues of recycling.

“Going into schools to try to carry the message of recycling, we’ve had to scale back on that,” said David Kerr, manager of the city’s environmental services.

The timing of the commodities crash couldn’t have been worse for the City of Thunder Bay. When its recycling contract came up for renewal last December, the price more than doubled. “We went from approximately a $1.2-million program to approximately a $2.4-million program,” said Jason Sherband, manager of solid waste and recycling services in Thunder Bay.

“Nobody’s thrilled, but at the end of the day, it’s … the new world that we’re living in.”

In the U.S., the financial burden of recycling has proven too great for some communities like Franklin, N.H., and Broadway, Va., which have cancelled their recycling programs. But in Ontario, that’s not an option: communities over 5,000 people are mandated by the province to recycle.

Exacerbating the financial problem are rapidly rising labour costs. Buyers who are still accepting recycling will only take the highest quality. Gone are the days when a greasy pizza box in a bale of cardboard or a piece of plastic slipped into a package of glass was passable. Now, plants are being forced to sort and sometimes re-sort products to meet stringent requirements, driving up manpower costs.

“It’s up 30 percent, for sure,” said Lorenzo Donini, director of government affairs and municipal relationships for GFL Environmental in Western Canada. “That’s at a good plant that relies on a lot of optical sorters and modern technology … If you’re a plant that was based only on labour, your labour costs may have actually doubled.”

Lorenzo Donini, director of government affairs and municipal relationships for GFL Environmental in Western Canada

Lorenzo Donini, director of government affairs and municipal relationships for GFL Environmental in Western Canada

Global News

At some plants, they are considering adding staff to handle the strain.

“It’s become so much work for them to process the stuff twice,” said Holly Schell, Alberta operations manager with Environmental 360 Solutions.

“I just had a conversation today with our … facility supervisor and he said, ‘My guys, this is tough on them, and I don’t know what else to do. We’re going to have to rethink the process and revamp the hours we’re working and maybe get another team of people working a night shift just to try to keep up with it.’”

Realizing they’re going to have to spend the money either way, communities with deep enough pockets are trying to get ahead of the curve.

The Region of Peel, Ont., is investing $23 million in new sorting technology at its recycling facility. “It’ll open up new markets, and we expect to get better pricing,” said Norm Lee, director of waste management for the Region of Peel. Lee expects the investment will pay for itself within five years.

The Bluewater Recycling Association plant is also investing in upgrades. To Veilleux, its president, there’s no other choice. “Brace yourself: this is not a temporary thing. If you don’t adapt and modify your facilities, your infrastructure and maybe refocus the materials that you actually collect that can be recycled, you’re going to be in trouble.”

—With files from Christian D’Avino

Global News

April 29, 2019

SEE FULL ARTICLE AT: https://globalnews.ca/news/5199883/canada-recycling-programs/

The world’s big plastic makers want more recycling so they can keep pumping out plastic

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste says it will spend at least $1 billion to keep plastic waste out of the environment. But its members–like ExxonMobil, Shell, Dow–are undermining the commitment by ramping up their own plastic production. “We do need more recycling infrastructure as part of the solution,” says Graham Forbes, the global plastic leader at Greenpeace. “But when you look at the facts, the companies sitting around the table committing $1 billion largely to collect plastic waste are at the same time part of an almost $200 billion investment in increasing petrochemical production. The numbers just don’t match up.”

In Southeast Asia, as one part of the plan, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste will help cities build badly-needed new recycling infrastructure. But most of the companies that are funding the new effort, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste–a group of 30 corporations that includes ExxonMobil, Shell, Dow, and others in the oil and gas and plastics industries–are simultaneously planning to increase their own plastic production.

 

The world’s big plastic makers want more recycling so they can keep pumping out plastic
          [Image: Daniel Salo (Illustration), tastykle3d/Blendswap (mesh)]

The new nonprofit plans to support recycling infrastructure in the places where plastic is most likely to “leak” into rivers and the ocean, and will support Renew Oceans, a project that works to capture plastic before it reaches the ocean. It also will help fund the Incubator Network by Circulate Capital, an investment management firm that invests in startups that prevent ocean plastic. All of these are worthwhile pursuits. But the oil and plastic companies behind the project are missing a key part of the bigger problem: If we’re struggling to deal with plastic waste now, how much worse will things become when the amount of new plastic radically grows? How can companies stop making so much plastic in the first place? As recycling increases, how will their business models change?

In 2018, another group of corporations made a broader commitment: PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, and dozens of others pledged to eliminate problematic plastic packaging; switch to reuse models when appropriate; make all of their plastic packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025; make sure that packaging actually is reused, recycled, or composted; decouple plastic from finite resources like oil; and eliminate hazardous chemicals and protect the health of workers making plastic. Procter & Gamble, notably, didn’t make this pledge, called the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, but instead joined the oil and plastic companies in the new alliance.

It’s possible that the new nonprofit could help reduce plastic in some small way. Circulate Capital, one of the beneficiaries, is “looking to invest in all sorts of solutions,” says Rob Kaplan, founder and CEO of the firm. “Waste and recycling is by far the most developed and investable today. But one of the reasons we created our incubation network program is to look at other business models for reduction or reuse or alternative delivery models that could become investable someday. Our view is there’s no silver bullet to solving this problem, and you’re going to need recycling, reduction, reuse, regulation–no single agenda will solve this.” A spokesperson for the Alliance to End Plastic Waste said that the alliance “will rethink how we design certain products to make them more efficient while improving recyclability.”

Reduction, though, isn’t a primary focus of the project. It’s consistent with the stance that industry has taken in the past, says Forbes. “I think if you look historically, this industry, for really the past four or five decades, has really sort of put forward this notion that if we just recycle our way out of things and we make things recyclable, that will [solve the problem],” he says. “It really reinforces this notion that consumers and end users are responsible for what these companies produce.” Now, he says, more enlightened companies are realizing that’s not enough.

“Companies for the first time are acknowledging, a) that we can’t recycle our way out of this crisis, and b) that reduction needs to be an important part of the conversation,” he says. “What we’re really looking for is this movement away from single-use delivery models and putting much more emphasis on reuse, reusability, and going beyond just the material, and looking at a more fundamental shift in how business models operate.”

 

Adele Peters, Fast Company

January 25, 2019

https://www.fastcompany.com/90295292/the-worlds-big-plastic-makers-want-more-recycling-so-they-can-keep-pumping-out-plastic

SEE ALSO:

Corporate Insistence On Single-Use Plastics & Protecting The Environment