Should Recycling Be Taken Seriously?
We do have recycling here in AZ. They give you an ~55-gallon container on wheels. You fill it up and set it out on a Tuesday. Since it is just Jan and I, we do not have many recyclable throwaways. I carve boxes up so we can get more things in the container. I do not want to be carting the container out every week. Only two of us, so it may be every three or 4 weeks pickup. They take everything recyclable. People in the US do not take this seriously, There is no coinage coming back at you. In AZ, recycling for many is a PITA.
AS you will read, Canada takes recycling more seriously.
“Why we need deposits on everything,” Carbon Upfront!
Lloyd Alter
We have to fight back against the onslaught of single-use packaging and fix the systems we have, starting with the Beer Store.
I have been waiting for this- The headline in the Toronto Star: “Time to ditch bottle deposits.” The online version is “This Ontario recycling program is a bizarre relic, and Doug Ford should scrap it.” Matt Gurney complains the bottle return system run by The Beer Store is no longer fit for purpose.
This was inevitable because Ontario Premier Doug Ford has done everything he could to destroy the system, as he does with everything he touches.
Since 1927, the Province of Ontario has had a system where you bought your beer from The Beer Store (formerly Brewers Retail), usually in a standard bottle (formerly known as a “stubby”), usually in a box of twelve with a handle (a “Scarborough Suitcase”). They always were returning for their deposit. Then they were washed and refilled.
In 2018, Doug Ford promised to put “beer in every corner store,” calling it “the largest expansion of consumer choice and convenience since the end of prohibition almost 100 years ago.” By 2024, it was everywhere. However, Galen Weston (supermarkets) and Couche-Tard (corner stores) didn’t want the responsibility or cost of dealing with returns and deposits, so people still have to go to the beer store to get their deposit money back. Except that the beer stores with their big parking lots are all being sold off for condominiums, so it is far less convenient. And then everyone is shocked, shocked! to find out that the return rate is down to 75%. And it is almost impossible to find bottles anymore; cans are easier to stock. No matter that they are still mostly lined with gender-bending BPA, and the cans are almost all imported from the USA.
However, to completely destroy the beer store, you have to destroy the recycling system. Enter Matt Gurney in the Star, who complains,
“So here’s an idea. Just throwing it out there. Maybe we should kill this entire program on the grounds that it’s really stupid? Like, gosh, folks. We already have recycling programs. Uptake is admittedly not great; Ontario has a fairly low level of diversion via recycling, with most discarded items ending up in landfills. But this particular “solution” is dumb.”
And why is the uptake in our recycling programs not great? Because there is no incentive. There are no deposits. Gurney continues:
“Still, to illustrate how nuts this is: let’s imagine McDonald’s adds a $1 fee to every drive-through and takeout order, but you get your dollar back if, having enjoyed your Big Mac and McNuggets at home or on the road, you bring your trash back to any McDonald’s location and hand it over…. No one would think that made sense. We’d think anyone proposing this system today were nuts.”
Well, call me nuts. We should have deposits on everything. Every Tim Horton’s and McDonald’s coffee cup, every plastic water bottle and every takeout container.
In Aarhus, Denmark, single-use disposable cups are banned. Everyone drinks their take-out from plastic cups with a 70-cent deposit. There are machines all over town that give you your money back.
In Catalonia, Spain, the beaches are littered with cigarette butts (as is every street in Toronto where Matt Gurney and I live), so they have proposed a 20-cent deposit on every cigarette butt. “The government plans to pay 4 Euros to anyone who turns in a pack’s worth of cigarette butts at a recycling point. A 20-cent levy on every cigarette will cover the costs associated with this scheme. This would almost double the price of a pack of Marlboro Reds.”
And Gurney thinks it would be nuts to put a deposit on McDonald’s packaging? He then complains that the bottle return is a parallel system to the blue bins.
“Let’s kill the program, scrap the deposits and spend what money the government has already collected on advertisements reminding people to put their empties in the blue bin… What doesn’t work is what we’ve got now. Our nominally conservative premier should see that this entire program is ridiculous. And he should kill it.”
But what we’ve got now doesn’t work because of our idiot premier. They did not used to be parallel systems; the blue box was for recycling, and the beer store was for refilling, an entirely different thing.
Unfortunately, it won’t happen in Doug Ford’s Ontario; single-use plastics are solid fossil fuels, and he is Premier Enbridge. I suspect that Matt Gurney is just a bit ahead of Doug on this issue. Doug Ford has almost destroyed the system now and has a few more years to finish the job.
How we got here:
Here at the seaside cottage overlooking the urban hellhole I do my best to it right ~ I can fit a month’s cardboard in a Trader Joe’s paper bag, two weeks of recyclable plastics and metal in another ~ knowing that when that big blue barrel hits the back of the garbage truck it’s all going to the same place. Makes me feel better
To be fair, it’s a matter of sheer scale: the sheer immensity of the waste we in aggregate produce and the details of what can and cannot be recycled makes it nigh on impossible. Not to mention the labor pool recycling has drawn upon has been either deported or are afraid to leave the house
Our actual garbage runs to (usually) a tall kitchen plastic bag a week …
@Ten,
Decades ago, I recall dropping off recycling at separate stations for glass, paper and metal*. I had the feeling that there was actual recycling going on back then. Nowadays, we fill up the blue bin with “recycling,” but I suspect this is just virtue signaling. Like driving around in an EV when 95% of the recharging electricity is generated by natural gas.
*of course, driving to the recycling center wasn’t exactly green
Joel:
Lowest level Labor. You do the low-level stuff and they dispose of it in the easier manner they can. Who would think, there might be a way to minimize it from the beginning? I believe the three of us understand the product pitch is really not necessary. To minimize the waste, start at the beginning.
Am I the only one old enough to remember when all glass bottles had deposits on them? I believe they were washed and reused. The milk bottles went back to the dairy and were replaced with bottles full of milk so you really only paid the deposit once and collected it back when you stopped going to the dairy for milk or moved. Finding discarded bottles was the only source of income for most of us kids too young to be given an allowance. We always took them to the corner store with the best candy selection, but I think most stores took them back. They went into the empty cases and went back to the bottler. Of course cans came in and that was the death knell for most bottles, just as milk at the store was the death knell for dairies.
Here trash collection is mandatory, and includes trash, recyclables, and organics. I only put out my cans every other week, because there is not enough in them to justify walking them to the curb and back. Food organics are to be put in plastic bags (any you have on hand, compostable not required). I get one bag a week of scraps and peels. In a 75 gallon can. They did hand out nice little counter top plastic pails with sealing lids though.
Jane:
Ahem. No, you are not the only one. It is scary too, Been where many here were not over the decades. The refund was $.02
I stopped using glass years when I realized it was, as Dr Joel’s mini-dig virtue-signaling. As a practical glass just doesn’t recycle at scale. When the big blue barrel is dumped in the back of the garbage and they crush it, it busts all the glass up and you’re sweeping it up out of the street
Do not mistake me, I am not suggesting glass doesn’t recycle ~ there’s probably none better. I’m saying it just doesn’t dispose well …
@Ten,
There’s no broken glass left behind on our streets in the wake of recycle truck collections. What happens at the destination, I have no idea.
@Jane,
I too am (barely) old enough to recall milk arriving in glass bottles that were returned empty. Soon, though, it got too expensive for my parents, who switched to powdered milk in cardboard boxes.
Joel:
We always had milk. In the beginning in the delivered 1 gallon glass jugs. And then (I believe) my parents were buying it at the grocery store, A&P, National, etc. It was not cheap for 4 of us. But, we always had milk.
@Bill,
My parents had five kids supported only my dad’s salary. Powdered milk was still milk, but way cheaper. It helped to drink it cold, when it didn’t taste so bad.
Only after I got married did I start using fresh milk.
That’s one I had completely eradicated from memory …
I live in Denver. Recycling pickup is every 2 weeks. We fill the bi. Mostly with cutup cardboard boxes, wine bottles, and the 6-days-a-week WSJ.
We just spent a week in Toronto on vacation. There was a 20¢ CAD deposit on wine purchased at the grocery store. We threw the bottles into the trash. 20¢ on a $25 CAD bottle is mouse nuts.
Dave:
There were no kickbacks in Michigan. None in AZ either. In any case, we still recycle as it makes sense to do so. It is weekly in AZ.