Getting “boxed” into a corner

Blue box recycling, according to the standard line, has been very, very good to plastic. Not only has it popularized plastics’ image as a recyclable material, which of course it is, but it has enhanced public acceptance of plastic as a packaging material by neutralizing the view that plastic is bad for the environment.

There is certainly validity to this argument, and to this extent, say some, the passage of Bill 90 in Ontario and Bill 102 in Quebec (see our cover story), is in the best interest of the plastics industry. Both Bills will require industry to fund 50% of the costs of each province’s municipal blue box recycling programs. By ensuring the survival of the blue box program, they say, we are ensuring the long-term acceptance of plastic as a cost-effective, safe and environmentally-friendly packaging material.

And indeed, of the many people I talked to or interviewed for this story, hardly anyone had anything bad to say about these Bills. There was a bit of grumbling here and there, but no one, at least in their official capacity, wanted to openly trash a law securing the future of a popular program to reduce trash.

But there are some legitimate concerns about the long-term effects these laws will have on the market pressure to select one packaging material over another, the Canadian economy as a whole, and possibly even the objective of reducing garbage in landfills.

Bill 90, for example, will create a new, huge costly bureaucracy, Waste Diversion Ontario, to oversee the regulation of everything from used oil to old tires. But the first, immediate act of the 15 member Board will be to devise a formula for assessing brand owners (Coke, Yoplait) and importers of first record (Loblaws, e.g.) fees or levies for the amounts and types of packaging deposited in the blue box.

People at the centre of drafting this Bill have absolute faith a fee formula can be concocted that will create a level playing field (a favorite phrase) among the different packaging materials. A weight-based formula, for example, would add costs to products packaged in glass, as this material is the heaviest of all blue box materials. A sales- or volume-based formula could work against plastic. So apparently there will have to be some attempt at combining all these factors in the formula for assessing levies.

Yet, in a worse case scenario for recycling activists, this non-market based law could push companies into using low-grade, non-recyclable materials, thus actually increasing the amount of waste shipped to landfills.

These laws of course will also add to the costs of companies in Ontario and Quebec in comparison to competitors in the U.S., where there is no such legislation. The costs are likely to be passed on to suppliers (packaging manufacturers) and eventually consumers.

So why is business by and large jumping on board to support these laws? Because they feel they have no choice and could get something much worse — a stringent product stewardship along the lines of Europe’s Green Dot program, which requires companies to take cradle-to-grave responsibility for the products they make.

Blue box recycling is of course a motherhood issue, one most people have long stopped thinking critically about. The truth is, however, for all the hundreds of millions of dollars thrown into it, and the considerable pollution it generates to collect and process the discarded stuff, blue box programs divert only a fraction of the total waste going to landfill.

Or as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg put it after his decision to kill the city’s $60 million a year recycling program, “It was phenomenally expensive, and most of it ended up being dumped in a landfill anyway.”

Michael LeGault, editore-mail: mlegault@canplastics.com