Canada's recycling industry is broken, but there is hope

Global News has produced an excellent three-part series on the trials and tribulations of Canada's recycling industry:

• Is Canada's recycling industry broken?
• The losing economics of recycling: Canada's green industry is deep in the red.
• Canada's recycling industry is on life support. Here's how to fix it.

Once the envy of the world (or at least the non-European world: Europe has always been way out ahead in this area, as on most other environmental issues), Canada's laudable attempt to recycle materials is currently foundering. What could once be sold at a profit now costs money to haul away, and more and more municipalities are cutting back on what they recycle, when they really need to be increasing it. Consequently, more and more recycling is being sent to landfills as cities and provinces balk at the increased costs of recycling.
Recycling was never a money-making proposition. The income from those items that do have some commercial value is used to subsidize the costs of processing the less desirable parts (aluminum is by far the most valuable and profitable resource for recyclers). But, as income from recycled materials is reduced or no longer available due to market shifts, then the whole house of cards is at risk of tumbling down.
To give some idea of the problem, in the last couple of years in Ontario, mixed paper prices have fallen by 110% (yes, it now has a negative price, as does mixed glass), and newspaper, cardboard and film plastic prices have dropped by 50% or more. More staff have been needed to be hired to sort (and often re-sort) garbage, in order to weed out contaminating item from ever-pickier recycling streams. Municipalities are therefore left with two options: raise taxes or cut recycling programs. And everyone knows how popular tax increases are...
For many years, Canada shipped about half of its recycling to China, with lesser amounts going to the US, India and a few other Asian countries. This was a convenient, if slightly suspect, policy, and it became something of a dependency for the industry in Canada. But, in early 2018, China closed its doors to 24 types of recycling waste, including some kinds of plastic and paper, and insisted of a much purer and higher quality of sorted materials for what it did take. This threw the whole industry in Canada into a tailspin. (It also came out that, for years, China had actually been extracting high value materials from its imported Canadian garbage and just junking and burning the rest. Surprise, surprise.) Malaysia, India, Vietnam and Taiwan have followed suit since, and are all taking much less from Canadian recyclers
North American recycling facilities just cannot cope. "Residual rates", the percentage of recycling that actually ends up being trashed, have sky-rocketed from about 10% to 25%, or even 40% in some cases (Toronto's residual rate, for example, has increased from 22% to about 30%). Some cities have completely stopped collecting some types of recycling that they used to collect, an unfortunate trend that further reduces public confidence in the whole process.
So, what can be done? Some municipalities - those that can afford it, like Peel Region just north of Toronto, for example - are investing in improved sorting facilities in the hope of opening up new markets and obtaining better pricing. This is a good first step.
The other hope for the future, though, is a model called "extended producer responsibility" or EPR, such as has operated in British Columbia since 2014. Under this system, any company that makes, sells or imports a product whose packaging is collected in the province's blue box recycling system is obliged to pay for the recycling of that packaging. Producers must recover 75% of the packaging they produce, or pay a fine for not hitting their target (although, amazingly, they have always achieved their target so far). There is also a provision for the province to increase that target as they see fit.
Under this "polluter pays" philosophy, retailers are therefore encouraged to reduce their packaging in order to reduce their recycling costs, or at least to use packaging that is more easily recycled. And now, of course, the onus to recycle is no longer on the municipalities and taxpayers, but on the companies who created the garbage problem in the first place. A group of some 1,300 companies (including Loblaws, Procter & Gamble, Boston Pizza, Apple, Keurig, and many other household names) have come together to form Recycling BC, a non-profit organization for residential recycling, and it is currently in the process of increasing the range of products it recycles while other municipal recyclers are cutting back. As a result, BC has by far the best recycling rate in Canada, estimated at 69%.
That makes so much sense to me. I bet Tim Hortons in BC doesn't use unrecyclable black lids on their coffee cups, and I bet Loblaws in BC doesn't sell sweetcorn on unrecyclable black styrofoam trays. Actually, I didn't realize it, but several other Canadian provinces have partial EPR systems - Ontario has a 50% system - but only BC has a fully-functional 100% EPR system (mind you, some of the more enlightened countries in Europe have been following this model since the mid-90s).
There are other ways in which regulation can help (this is one example where market forces just aren't sufficient). NDP MP Nathan Cullen introduced a private members bill last February which would ban any packaging that can't be recycled or composted. However, this seems to be too strong for the Liberals, whose support is needed to pass the bill, even though they say they support it "in principle".
The other thing that could be done - and that been at least partially implemented in California - is for government to mandate that all packaging contain a certain percentage of recycled content. This would create a built-in market for recycled materials, which would make the economics of recycling more palatable. There are no takers in Canada for such a move as yet, but we can hope.