The Campaign for Real Recycling - let's start with milk containers

Yesterday we launched phase one of a Campaign for Real Recycling.

We're fighting back against companies that are trying to hijack recycling by passing off dumbed-down recycling as the real thing.

Worse, they're calling it EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility).

We've been tracking the spread of dumbed-down recycling on this blog (read these past posts from the bottom up).

The issue is urgent right now in British Columbia because producers of throw-away packaging have organized themselves into a lobby group that is proposing "EPR for packaging" that is classic dumbed-down recycling.

"Multi-Materials BC" is seeking the provincial government's approval to set up a single, province-wide dumbed-down recycling program that they will control. A growing number of us who are paying attention are really worried.

The first local meeting to "consult with the public" about all this is at 10:00 am on Thursday, October 13th.

Multi-Materials BC is proposing a "multi-material" recycling program that allows you to mix different kinds of materials together. Once the materials have left your curb (and been counted as "recycled"), they are crushed together in a truck, dumped on a cement floor, shoved around with a front-end-loader and dumped on a moving conveyor belt. Workers grab things that might be recognizable as recyclable commodities (though they are degraded by being mixed with other materials) and what they don't grab (amounting to as much as 40% of the mix) falls off the conveyor into the garbage.

This approach is favoured by producers of stuff that is hard to recycle, because their stuff gets credit for being recycled even though it ends up in the landfill or incinerator.

It is favoured by producers of stuff that is easy to recycle, because most of these companies are more interested in selling new stuff than taking care of their old stuff.

It is favoured by garbage companies, because it allows them to do what they've always done: haul large loads of worthless stuff and get paid for it.

It is even favoured by many of our well-intentioned local governments, because they are trying to save up-front municipal costs and simplify things for citizens.

It is based on the demeaning view that people are lazy and won't bother to do recycling right so you have to give them a program that is all about "convenience" rather than doing things right.

But we have one program here in BC that proves them wrong. The deposit system for beverage containers contradicts all the rules of dumbed down recycling.

It keeps materials separate, so they can be recycled into the highest-value markets. It exposes the hard-to-recycle materials and puts pressure on producers to improve their products (remember the old HDPE base cups on 2-litre PET pop bottles? Gone, because they made it hard to recycle.)

It proves that *incentives* work better than convenience to motivate people to recycle.

Deposits get up to 95% of targeted containers back -- double or triple the rate of "convenient" dumbed-down recycling services.

That's why we're calling for refundable deposits on milk containers.

Not only will putting milk in the deposit system get back more containers, in better condition, than any dumbed down recycling program.

It will deprive dumbed-down recycling of a victory. One hundred and forty million milk containers that are sold each year in BC wil create jobs, provide income supplements, and offer kids fundraising opportunities in our communities before going to high-value recycling markets -- all at no expense to the taxpayer.

Who could be against that? Sign on and lend your voice to the campaign against dumbed-down recycling.

Pic: The Campaign for Real Recycling,
Read about our launch on News1130.

Recycle your old bicycle tires

One more reason to celebrate living in BC.

If you've got a tangle of old bike tires and tubes in the garage, you can unload them at a participating bike retailer and they will be recycled as part of our province's tire recycling program.

Twenty years ago BC put a $3 "levy" on new auto and truck tires and the money fuelled the development of a tire recycling industry.

The industry is made up of retailers taking back tires, truckers hauling them, processors preparing the rubber for reuse, and manufacturers taking the crumb rubber and making products with it. Once the industry was on its feet tires became regulated under the BC Recycling Regulation.

Now that we have a tire recycling industry, those levies on tires don't go to the government, but to one of the "stewardship organizations" that have sprung up in BC to handle recycling of particular products and packaging covered under the regulation. For an overview of this "stewardship industry" see this interesting Recycling Handbook.

Now there are tire recycling programs in every province of Canada that are modelled more or less on the BC program. Some programs are still in earlier stages of their evolution. The evolution is from traditional government-run recycling to entirely industry-run recycling where government sets environmental standards. This evolution is happening to everything we buy. It will be as easy to recycle an old tire (or whatever) as it was to buy it in the first place.

Tire retailers are the backbone of the tire return system. What's new this year is that bicycle retailers have joined the system as a pilot to take back bike tires and tubes. For more information see the Tire Stewardship website.

The kids are all right

Metro politicians really let us down this summer.

Check out this video and answer this question: will the Metro Board's incinerators help solve our problem? What is going to be left the kid who made this video and the rest of his generation if we burn their inheritance...

It's not over until the Minister signs off -- he's waiting to hear from us: env.minister@gov.bc.ca

Metro doesn't get it

Metro's waste plan could have been written in 1990. It is completely uninformed by all the important developments that have happened over the past 20 years. It's like they've been in a time warp.

This province is setting the pace for North America -- even the world -- in Extended Producer Responsibility, which will eliminate waste by shifting waste management from a public bail-out to a strict producer/consumer responsibility.

Through EPR, we could be the leaders in re-visioning recycling, so it becomes part of the shopping experience rather than part of the garbage collection experience.

If we do it right, producers will be courting consumers with enticements to bring back their worn-out products so they can be safely "stewarded" from cradle to cradle. Retailers are already showing signs of recognizing this opportunity: London Drugs taking back styrofoam, retailers making a commitment to cut plastic bag use in half.

But Metro is doing it wrong. Rather than building on these promising starts, Metro is proposing welfare for waste.

Metro's recycling innovation: a bunch of publicly funded Eco-Centres. These centres will compete against EPR. They will steal business from the small businesses that could provide better service at no cost to the taxpayer. Corinne Atwood, Executive Director of the BC Bottle Depot Association, made an impassioned statement at the Metro consultation session in Delta last week. She -- and I -- want to see the recycling industry grow, but Metro will kill it.

The rest of the world is looking to British Columbia to show the way to cradle-to-cradle EPR recycling. Metro's ill-conceived public Eco Centres will fail at recycling and their staggeringly costly public incinerators will turn the next generation's resources into Greenhouse Gas.

Surely we can do better. After four years of trying to talk sense to Metro, Zero Waste Vancouver is going to give up and start working with local municipalities to pursue the vision of community economic development that EPR promises. Municipalities will fill the gap that Metro has left.

E-waste program success story?

In BC we take computers back to be recycled in a program that is authorized by Sony, Dell, HP, Apple, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

All those good names and logos are on the line that our e-waste won't end up in the place pictured here.

This is the place where our federal government sent its e-waste until good work by the Basel Action Network brought images like this home.

The timing couldn't have been better. British Columbia's landmark, earth-changing Industry Product Stewardship legislation was shining the spotlight on major brand-owners, calling them to the table, saying: "This is your problem. Solve it."

The brand-owners got the message. Seeing the handwriting on the wall -- that they were going to have to take back e-waste and recycle it -- they developed a sheet of Vendor Qualifications setting out for the recycling companies wanting to do business with them what could, and couldn't, happen to all those products bearing their brands. What couldn't happen was prison labour or export to non-OECD/EU countries (such as China).

The Electronic Stewardship Association of BC is the group of brand-owners that oversees what happens to ewaste in our province. They are asking their Advisory Committee (on which Zero Waste Vancouver has a seat) what should be their priorities for the coming year when they sit down in the fall to develop an Annual Plan for 2011.

What should I tell them on your behalf?

For myself, I'm going to ask them what they are doing to avoid the public relations disaster being suffered this week by the Ontario government, which is allowing e-waste to end up in landfills.

Pic: Huffington Post -- The World's Most Bizarre [and heartwrenching] Man-Made Disasters.

Metro politicians looking for places to cut? Start with a half-billion dollar incinerator.

At today's meeting of the Metro Waste Committee the taxpayer burden was very much on our politicians' minds.

They're faced with billions of dollars in urgent needs -- Translink, upgrades to the sewage system, the water treatment system. It goes on and on. When, our politicians wondered aloud , are our local taxpayers going to revolt?

While they were anguishing over this, Johnny Carline (CAO) introduced the topic of whether the new Solid Waste Management Plan should allow the use of out-of-region incineration as a back-up plan to in-region incineration. (cost: an extra 30% by Metro's own reckoning - but Carline didn't mention this).

If our politicians are looking for a place to trim public costs, isn't the incinerator project where they should be starting?

Why are we even talking about going into debt to clean up a mess that should be handled by the producers of throw-away products and packaging? What about producer responsibility?

Incinerators not only let producers off the hook -- they do it at taxpayer cost. Darrell Mussato (North Van City) noted that EPR programs get municipalities out of paying the high cost of waste management. Then the moment passed.

But when the penny drops that building a big incinerator is going to be a public hand-out to the corporations that Derek Corrigan (Burnaby) and Joe Trasolini (Port Moody) were rightly criticizing as not interested in waste reduction, we may see a turn-around.

Write dmussatto@cnv.org a quick note of encouragement!

Pic: Darrell Mussato

Landmark lawsuit challenges New York City recycling law

We are poised at a turning point in the history of waste management, and the outcome of a lawsuit against New York City may confirm that we have really turned a corner -- or send us back to the bad old days.

Computer makers are challenging a municipal ordinance that requires them to collect old computers ("e-waste") from households and recycle it. This is a somewhat unusual formulation of a broader principle, called Extended Producer Responsibility (or EPR). BC happens to be the place where this new principle is most widely applied in law, so this suit could be interesting to us.

Here's what the plaintiffs in the New York suit said, according to a recent article in the magazine Recycling Today (emphasis added):

“The E-waste Program retroactively and fundamentally alters the terms of the original contract of sale for a CEE (consumer electronics equipment) between the manufacturer and the consumer (or distributor, retailer, etc., as the case may be). Prior to the enactment of the E-waste Program, a manufacturer sold the CEE for a certain price, relying on the fact that the manufacturer was permanently transferring full title and it would not be required to take title to the product again at the end of its useful life.”

The article says that the brief was jointly filed by several non-electronics manufacturing associations who said they 'are also greatly concerned that allowing the E-waste Program to take effect will encourage other jurisdictions to adopt laws that shift disposal costs historically borne by voting local taxpayers who discard consumer products onto non-voting, out-of-state or off-shore manufacturers who make them.'"

Clever lawyers!

By sticking up for aggrieved out-of-state manufacturers they are distracting the Court from the greater injustice. For the better part of a century global corporations have been dumping responsibility for disposing of their products on voting local taxpayers in local communities -- many of whom may not have purchased a computer at all.

Indeed a whole raft of legislation exists now that puts the onus on local governments to clean up after the Throw-Away Economy, spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars dollars on incinerators and landfills.

It will be really interesting if this lawsuit finally tests whether a company can absolve itself of responsibility just by transferring ownership of a product from itself to the consumer. EPR is based in the idea of a chain of custody that starts with the brand owner and ends with the consumer -- but does NOT include the taxpaying public in the communities where the products are sold, used, and discarded.

Editor of Solid Waste & Recycling Magazine puzzled by Metro's plan

Guy Crittenden is the long-time editor of Canada's premier recycling magazine, Solid Waste and Recycling, which is read by solid waste professionals all across North America.

Guy wrote to me yesterday about exciting developments in Ontario and Quebec.

Basically, the two provinces in central Canada with the largest populations and largest economies are adopting the very strategies that we pioneered here in British Columbia almost two decades ago. They are putting in place framework legislation similar to our Recycling Regulation that shifts responsibility for waste from local municipalities to the producers of products that made the products (called EPR or Extended Producer Responsibility).

Along with a firm commitment to EPR, these two governments are committing serious money ($650 million in QC alone) to help municipalities beef up their composting infrastructure.

I wrote back congratulating Guy and the citizens of Ontario and Quebec on this success -- and mentioned that here in Lotus Land our largest municipality is preparing to send our EPR programs up in smoke.

Here is what Guy wrote back to me:

Why would Metro Vancouver go the incineration route when the rest of the country is starting to (finally) embrace producer responsibility?

He went on: "BC has been the leader for some time in Zero Waste/EPR and it seems that Metro Vancouver is undermining the provincial policy.

Crittenden says that the draft Ontario waste diversion plan also makes it clear that incineration cannot be counted as 'diversion' (as VANOC is regrettably doing! -- more about that later).

The Ontario government's message is clear that large mass burn units won't contribute to a municipality's or an industry's waste diversion program.

(Metro's Draft Plan actually opens with a suggestion on page 5 that "the conventionally defined" diversion rate includes source separated material that is used as fuel being considered 'recycled.' Prudently, Metro stops short of counting burning as recycling in its plan, but it is clear from the Plan that this is the direction our regional engineers want our province to go.)

Pic: Editor's Blog, SW&R

Composting dirty diapers in Toronto ~ let's get it right

In an interesting article in the NY Times last month, Oakland was recognized for its green-waste composting program. Citizens there can compost yard waste ~ and also food waste and paper napkins.

But Toronto, it turns out is even greener. They collect dirty diapers, animal waste and kitty litter along with the food waste. They send it all to a facility to be turned into fertilizer for farmlands and parks. Dirty diapers, the article suggests, are "helping Canadian crops to grow."

Which way will we go with composting?

Metro Vancouver is in the final stages of negotiations with two companies to process organics. The Recycling Council of BC has formed an Organics Working Group that will report back to its Policy Committee in June with recommendations on best practices for organics programs.

Will Toronto be our model? Will we provide composting for dirty diapers?

We will want to look at Toronto's system top to bottom before we make up our minds. The NYT article closes with a caution: "Some of the diapers may still end up in a landfill, however, due to an overuse of plastic bags in some areas served by the Green Bin program."

Because Toronto designed their program to allow folks to wrap up their compostable organics in plastic bags, the program produces thousands of tonnes of non-compostable plastic residuals each year that have to go to landfills or incinerators to be destroyed. According to a member of RCBC's Working Group who has visited the Toronto area facility, the non-compostable residuals could run as high as 21 percent of the material collected.

The plastic in diapers would meet a similar fate.

To this blogger it does not make sense to design a composting program to take non-compostable materials. I hope that our programs clearly prohibit plastics of all types.

And I hope that we go after the producers of disposable diapers and require them to take them back ~ the way we make beverage producers take back cans and bottles.

By cleaning up after Pampers and Huggies, Toronto's program will lock in the bad design in disposable diapers that makes them hard to compost.

We should instead require the producers to come up with a design that can be composted.

Pic: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times.

Producer responsibility and vertical integration

Why are so many products designed for disposal ~ and what can we do to change that?

The answer: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). For as long as we can remember, producers sold products with the expectation that someone else would figure out what to do with them when they broke, wore out, or just got outmoded.

The "someone else" was our local governments, who became responsible for providing convenient weekly garbage programs to make all those throw-away products disappear.

BC is a leader in EPR, with a growing list of products (and associated packaging) that now go back for recycling or safe disposal to return centres provided by producers: beverage containers, old paint, medications, motor oil and filters, etc. etc. etc.

EPR can create new local economic opportunities. By extending the service life of products rather than sending them the direct route to the landfill, EPR creates business opportunities in repair, refurbishing, repurposing and resale. A good case in point is FreeGeek in downtown Vancouver, which takes obsolete computers and trains volunteers to service them.

But the challenge of EPR is working out the rights and responsibilities of actors in the new extended "value chain." If the producer has responsibilities under EPR, do they also have property rights over their products after the consumer is done with them? What sort of claim do the repair/reuse/recycling businesses have on these products?

These are interesting legal issues that will be the focus of a private member's bill in the Canadian parliament next week. NDP MP Brian Masse is sponsoring a bill supported by the Autmotive Industries Association of Canada that would give consumers "choice" in whether to take their cars to the dealer for servicing or go to independent repair shops.

Read coverage of the bill in the Vancouver Sun.

Reinventing our cities: is waste a public responsibility?

It's time to ask ourselves whether we want entire departments of our local governments devoted to management of waste.

The city of Vancouver spends upwards of $13 million dollars each year sending trucks around to collect our garbage and empty our recycling containers. Another $6 million emptying street litter bins.

So we're incurring public costs of more than $20 million a year to manage what we call "municipal waste." But is that waste really municipal?

Three-quarters of what we set out at the curb is throw-away products and packaging.

A strong case can be made that these are not "municipal" wastes at all. They are private wastes, produced by companies profiting from disposability. They are sold to consumers who turn to their local governments to make the problem go away.

EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) is a policy that would turn the clock back to a hundred years ago, before the birth of the Throw Away Society.

In 1900 most of our waste (75%) was ashes from heating our homes. Look for the blocked-off openings in the exterior walls of the basement in older homes, where the coal chute used to deposit fuel for the furnace.

Then there was food waste from our kitchens. Not surprisingly, our great-grandparents threw out about the same amount of food waste as we do. Stomachs have not changed much in all that time.

What has changed is that each of us produces 13 times more throw-away products and packaging than our grandparents did. They lived in an era before plastic water bottles, "milk to go," squeezable ketchup bottles, Swiffers, etc. etc. etc.

You may think life is better now, with all those conveniences. But surely it doesn't make sense for public servants to be providing the clean-up for all our throw-aways. How much more sensible for the producers to take them back and recycle them, the way beer bottles still go back to be refilled in this country of ours.

If we could eliminate all the private wastes from our public garbage system, that might just free up resources to spend composting food waste. This is a project that has been woefully neglected while our city chases after milk jugs and yogurt containers and squeezable ketchup containers...

Pic: The Benson Bubblers were a gift to the city of Portland from a rich businessman to facilitate the provision of public water for free.

Reroute that file

We have traditionally relied on municipal engineers for waste management, but maybe we should be talking to the Economic Development Officer.

Rather than engineering solutions, we might want to explore entrepreneurial solutions for reducing our waste.

Cities have all sorts of tools that they use to attract and encourage new businesses in the community. Have we tried using incentives and public policy instruments to encourage neighbourhood re-shopping opportunities along side shopping opportunities?

Our cities could provide vacant land or relax property taxes for innovative recycling businesses that bring in customers to buy (or sell) discards that would otherwise have gone to the curb.

These can be either clustered with other recycling businesses or tucked conveniently in amongst regular retail outlets.

I learned this week that one tonne of waste incinerated produces the equivalent of one barrel of oil. Even at $137/barrel, it seems like we could get more fun and community benefit from a discard mall than from an incinerator.

pic: www.historic-uk.com

A challenge

The provincial government just announced that two more product categories are going to come under the recycling regulation.

Producers of mercury containing products, notably the CFL lamps that are now flooding the market, are going to have to present a business plan for taking back burned out bulbs from consumers. (Major retailers are already taking back CFLs.)

And a broader range of electronic equipment is going to be collected back through programs provided by their producers, like the program for TVs and computer recycling system launched last August. We'll be able to dispose of defunct stereos, cellphones and other hand-held devices in programs paid for by producers and scrutinized by the government.

These programs are the envy of other jurisdictions. In most places, programs for taking back and recycling throw-away products and packaging are provided at public expense.

The purpose of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is to stimulate better product design and marketing systems by shifting the cost of waste back onto those with control over product design.

BC is one of the world leaders in EPR. During the 1990s those of us who were involved in pushing for it had a lot of hope that we had found a way to turn the waste tide.

Throw-away products and packaging comprise three-quarters of everything we throw away. Biodegradable materials like food and yard waste the remaining quarter. We thought we had found the formula for Zero Waste. Zero Waste = EPR + composting.

It makes good sense to make producers take back toxic products. But how about EPR for the high-volume trash that has filled our landfills prematurely? Those huge detergent bottles, for instance. Carpeting. Unrepairable furniture?

If we didn't create such huge haysacks of garbage, the needles would be easier to find.