Right in the centre - Recycling needs recycled idea

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Published on Thursday, April 14, 2016

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

In a recent joint meeting of the councils of North Cypress-Langford and the Town of Carberry, a perennial problem was discussed - recycling. One could say the topic of recycling was being recycled. Council agonized at length about what to do about contaminated recycling not being eligible to go for recycling. It was estimated the “lost” recycling cost the municipality $9,700 in 2015 over 2014.

All municipalities face the same problem. Most residents, if they take the time to bother with recycling, faithfully put out clean recycling material in the blue tubs or blue bins. However, some residents insist on dumping garbage into the blue bins, especially the unsupervised bins scattered around the various municipalities. As reported at the joint council, the drivers are doing all they can, as are the good folks at Evergreen Environmental. But all it takes is a bag of sloppy wet garbage in a recycling bin or dumpster and its recycling value is zero.

The municipalities will never beat this problem on their own. The council in question has tried signage, which every municipality has tried. Many municipalities have tried advertising and flyers and made presentations to schools and groups. It won’t solve the problem. The recycling business model in Manitoba is flawed.

Recycling has to be heavily subsidized. On its own, recycling is a money losing proposition. Recycling’s redemption is that it is a way of recovering or avoiding the long term landfill costs associated with pitching everything in the landfill. Standing on its own, it’s cheaper to fire recyclables into the landfill in the short term. It’s only in the long term that recycling makes sense.

Here’s a suggestion that might just be a solution. 

There is a levy on containers in Manitoba. It’s probably not high enough. Regardless of the price, none of the levy actually gets back directly to the person doing the recycling. The missing link in Manitoba is that the person actually gathering up the recycling doesn’t get paid. That has to change. There has to be something in it for people to remain committed in the long term to gathering clean recycled material. It might be the Boy Scouts, it might be the Kinsmen, it might be private individuals or companies. In many countries, recycling is a strong business with competition among the recyclers. In Korean cities, there are recyclers on the streets all the time, cruising around to scrounge up some more tonnage.

In jurisdictions such as Saskatchewan Alberta, residents get paid for bringing in beverage cans. The system works well and needs to apply to all recycling.

Even if recycling becomes more prevalent and efficient, municipalities are still left with what to do with garbage. That is an ongoing problem, a big problem and it isn’t going to go away. Evergreen Environmental may be on to somewhat of a solution if they can get a gasification project going. In many, many areas of the world, garbage is clean burned (gasification) and the energy is used to produce electricity. The residual metal can be recycled, the remaining ash can be mixed with asphalt for road paving.

To overcome all the problems involved in recycling and garbage disposal will take a long time. The current system isn’t working as well as it could. To work better will require different regulations at the provincial level. Nearly everyone wants a change for the better. Hopefully, that can happen, but it will need a distinct policy change at the provincial level to allow people and groups to benefit from recycling and to allow for gasification of garbage.