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Use once. Discard.
Is recycling working? Is it doing what we think it does? We have three main streams of residential waste in the County—garbage, recycling and compost. Two different trucks circulating along every lonely road in the County each week, ensuring one doesn’t get mixed up with the other. But what happens to all that recycling material? Is it actually being transformed into new paper, new plastic containers or other useful things? Or, once it disappears from our curb, is it disappearing into same hole as the garbage?
All summer long Enid Grace managed an array of recycling bins on the terrace of her café in Wellington. Customers dutifully filed their used coffee cups, plates and plastics into the various bins under the take-out window on her terrace. At the end of each day, she emptied the bins into larger bins—maintaining the sorted order.
But one day in August, Enid went to retrieve her bins from the roadside, only to find that several bins remained unemptied and a sticker advising her that paper coffee cups weren’t recyclable.
They were garbage.
A Quinte Waste Solutions spokesperson confirmed to The Times that indeed coffee cups are not accepted into their recycling system.
“The cups are designed in a way so the paper fibres do not disintegrate because of a hot liquid they are intended to hold, and therefore there is a plastic lining inside of the cups to keep the paper intact,” explained Rachel Revoy, communications coordinator for Quinte Waste Solutions. “The fibre companies that take other types of paper from us to make new material are not interested in paper cups.”
She also noted that aside from the lining, most coffee cups found in the recycling system haven’t been rinsed and therefore are often dirty and sticky.
These explanations, while plausible and perhaps understandable, are unreasonable—and ultimately defeating. It overlooks the fragility of our recycling enterprise. It undermines our faith that our efforts to recycle and to sort, is working to make a cleaner environment. At a significant cost.
Recycling, if it is to be successful at all, requires humans to follow steady and predictable patterns. Once trained, we become a valuable stream of raw material for those seeking to make paper, plastics or metal. A generation or more bought into this project. They felt good about reducing their impact on this planet. We were good at it. Or so we thought.
Has it all been a façade? Has the market for these materials collapsed since China stopped taking our recycling? If so, how should we respond?
All across Canada, municipalities are amassing growing mountains of recycling in the wake of China’s decision. Where once towns and regions earned a hundred dollars or more for a tonne of recycled paper, now they must pay for it to be taken away and processed. If it is processed at all. Or simply dumped into a landfill.
A coffee stain will contaminate a tonne of paper, making it unrecyclable. A dollop of yogurt in the bottom of a plastic cup makes a mound of cups garbage. A teaspoon of peanut butter renders a pile of plastic as landfill.
Given the shifting landscape of the recycling market, municipalities are focusing energy and resources on cleaning up the recycling stream. And thus, we have paper coffee cups rejected at the curbside.
This is the wrong response.
The more we learn that our efforts are wasted or useless, the fewer folks will bother. Worse, a generation who grew up sorting and prepping blue boxes, once disillusioned, won’t come back.
Or perhaps we are looking at an essentially economics problem the wrong way? Maybe it’s a technological issue.
It seems the coffee-stained cup with a plastic lining requires a technical fix—rather than the extinguishment of faith in recycling. After all, that paper originally came from trees—fibre that existed for a decade or more in an unpure woodland, exposed to a wide array of chemicals and ingredients in the process from pulp log to fine paper. We managed to figure that out. It doesn’t seem a stretch to think we might find a way to make paper, from paper with a coffee stain.
So the problem seems to be one of broken market signals. For now, the mounds of recycling material being dumped into landfills is out of sight. Municipal officials seem uncertain about how to react to the changed marketplace—the lack the entrepreneurial experience or incentive to innovate. So their response seems to be to constrict the supply stream. It is wrongheaded.
A better response is to reward innovators who will work toward a solution. If coffee stains are sending tonnes of recyclable paper to the landfill—let’s fix the coffee stain issue. Let’s, for example, create a $100,000 prize for the university research team that comes up with a viable technical solution. Let’s get Tim Hortons and McDonalds to kick in. We can figure this out.
Winnowing down the list of items permitted into the recycling stream seems a dead end. County residents currently spend about $600,000 in municipal taxes each year on recycling. Is it working?
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