recycling

Tuesday January 18, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday January 18, 2022

COVID-19 home testing kits: should we be worried about their environmental impact?

March 10, 2021

The highly transmissible Omicron variant has led to renewed interest in home testing kits. The UK is getting through millions of these tests each week, while US president Joe Biden has just ordered 500 million kits to send to Americans.

Along with vaccinations and better medication, the availability of rapid testing has meant that many countries are in a much better place to combat the pandemic than they were a year ago.

As with everything, though, testing has an environmental impact that warrants some investigation. So should we be worried about millions – or billions – of plastic test tubes and swabs?

Friday October 30, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday October 9, 2020

Industry has known for decades that most plastic just can’t be recycled, says investigative journalist

There has been a decades-long push to get the public to recycle plastic, even though the people behind the idea knew most plastic is too costly and difficult to recycle, says one investigative journalist.

April 22, 2020

“They have known since the 1970s how difficult and almost impossible it is to recycle the vast majority of plastic,” said Laura Sullivan, a three-time Peabody Award-winning investigative correspondent for NPR News. 

Sullivan conducted an in-depth investigation into the recycling industry, and said the problem starts with trying to separate the recyclable material from the non-recyclable, which adds to the overall high cost of the process. 

“Then, most importantly, the plastic degrades every time you try to reuse it,” she told The Current’s Matt Galloway, adding that this means some recycled items cannot be recycled again.

“In one speech, a former industry insider said that it was unlikely that the vast majority of plastic would ever be economically viable to recycle.”

June 1, 2019

Earlier this week, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced that the province will work to become a major plastics recycling hub for western North America, as part of his government’s new natural gas strategy. The federal government has also announced its intention to ban six types of single-use plastic by the end of 2021, but insisted the move would support, not hinder, Alberta’s plans.

Announcing plans to reach zero plastic waste by 2030, the federal government’s website noted that “every year, Canadians throw away 3 million tonnes of plastic waste, only 9% of which is recycled, meaning the vast majority of plastics end up in landfills.”

Sullivan’s investigation looked at plastic industry records over the last 40 years. She spoke to industry insiders involved in promoting plastic recycling to the general public.

April 24, 2018

She said that “in the 1990s, plastic was under fire, that people didn’t like plastic, there was just too much trash and they needed to do something about it.”

“The obvious answer was to recycle it all, but as we know, they knew they couldn’t do that,” she said.

“It began this campaign to sort of subtly suggest and imply and even outright say, ‘You can recycle plastic,’ when they knew that wasn’t true.”

At the time, Sullivan said the industry was hopeful that technology would improve and recycling costs would become more manageable, but that didn’t happen.

She said her investigation looked at 12 of the most highly touted projects to increase the amount of plastic being recycled, and found that all of them “fell apart” within five to seven years.

“They were started with great fanfare, they got a ton of publicity … and then they died quietly.” (CBC) 

 

Saturday June 1, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday June 1, 2019

It’s time we finally started to ‘get it’ on garbage and plastics

Let’s play a little weekend game of “What if …?”

April 29, 2019

This week, Malaysia became the second country in recent months to demand Canada take back garbage shipped under the pretense of it being recycling. This at the same time as the Government of the Philippines, dissatisfied with the pace of negotiations to return tonnes of garbage in that country, hired a ship to return the rotting trash to Canada.

Sensing a theme? Canada has an earned reputation as a bad actor on garbage. Our country leads the developed world in per-capita production of garbage. Successive governments at all levels have chosen not to deal with that reality, preferring to let the private sector manage our waste — including what happens to recyclables after we toss them in the blue box.

The private sector has done that in the way it always does: optimize earnings and profit. Most often that has meant paying someone to take our trash and recyclables. We have paid to dump garbage in the U.S. and developing world. We have sold recyclables to the highest bidder. And yes, private players have sold our garbage as recyclables.

January 16, 2019

The complaining countries don’t occupy any moral high ground here. In years past, they didn’t care much about what was being dumped on their shores as long as there was money to be made. It wasn’t uncommon for waste to be sorted into things that could be recycled and sold again, and trash that was simply dumped, often into the ocean.

That has changed. China, historically one of the biggest buyers, toughened regulations and disallowed much of what would previously have been welcome. Other countries, especially developing ones, became more concerned about environmental management and, therefore, less willing to sacrifice their national environments for profit.

April 24, 2018

The root of this problem is simple. Canada made the wrong choices on trash and recycling. Instead of investing in developing national infrastructure to deal with the challenges, we sold them to the highest offshore bidder. Now those bidders have shut down, and we need to retroactively build the infrastructure.

What if the international garbage boondoggle leads federal and provincial leaders to finally recognize this and develop policies that facilitate dealing holistically with our own trash? We can no longer dump our problems on other countries. It’s time Canada grew up and owned its own problems with waste. 

March 12, 2019

And speaking of growing up, what if the garbage scandal and the growing mountain of evidence about the threat of plastics pollution is a tipping point for us starting to take meaningful action on reducing single-use plastics?

We are taking baby steps. Plastic drinking straws are being replaced with paper ones. That and a handful of other modest measures are progress, but we’re barely scratching the surface. Check the supermarket or home store. We’re drowning in packaging.

What if public policy-makers finally started to put the onus on manufacturers to reduce plastics in packaging? What if there were incentives to do so or penalties for not doing so? What if consumers demanded change by doing things like buying the goods and leaving the packaging with the retailer?

Harsh, maybe even impolite? Maybe, but we really need to make significant headway on the plastics crisis. Right now, we’re just nibbling at the edges. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

“Graeme MacKay comments on an interesting and instructive story most Americans probably hadn’t heard about. Seems a Canadian company sold about 2,500 tons of what was supposed to be recyclable plastic to a company in the Philippines. However, when the shipping containers arrived, they proved to be full of household waste in addition to the plastic, rendering it useless. After several years of back-and-forth, Philippine President Duterte threatened first war and then simply to dump the garbage within Canadian waters. Finally, the Canadian government agreed to take the stuff back.”

Tuesday March 12, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday March 12, 2019

Ontario government ponders ban on single-use plastics

Ontario is weighing a ban on single-use plastics, which include bags, water bottles and straws.

April 24, 2018

Nearly a tonne of waste per person in Ontario is generated each year, and the rate at which that waste is diverted away from landfills — through recycling and composting, for example — has stalled around 30 per cent for the past 15 years.

The government recently released a discussion paper on reducing litter and waste,  and is asking the public and stakeholders for input on how to best address the problem. One question it asks is if a ban on single-use plastics would be effective in reducing plastic waste.

Environment Minister Rod Phillips said it’s an area in which the government is very open.

January 16, 2019

“We are essentially saying, ‘How would those work and how have they worked in other jurisdictions effectively?”‘ Phillips said in an interview. “Plastics is a priority from our government’s point of view, particularly as we talk about plastics in our waterways.”

It is estimated that almost 10,000 tonnes of plastic debris enter the Great Lakes each year, the discussion paper says. Ontario’s Blue Box recycling program recovers only about 28 per cent of all plastic packaging in the province.

Ontario is also mulling a deposit return system for plastic bottles and other containers, as is used in some other provinces.

March 6, 2015

Keith Brooks, programs director at Environmental Defence, said a lot of single-use plastics are unnecessary, pointing to straws and cutlery.

“I think that a ban on some single-use plastics makes a lot of sense,” he said. “I think it’s a good conversation to have.”

But by asking such a broad question, the answer may be no, Brooks cautioned, saying he didn’t think any jurisdiction has banned all single-use plastics.

“There’s some single-use plastics that are probably going to continue to be used…for food safety reasons and things like that,” he said, though he would push for them to be standardized and recyclable. (Source: CBC) 

 

Saturday July 21, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday July 21, 2018

These are dark days for recycling and composting in Hamilton

If you’re among the thousands of citizens who try to do the right things about recycling and waste diversion, these are not good times.

It’s a discouraging double-whammy.

May 2, 2018

Part one happened early this year. After years of imploring citizens to put items like coffee cup lids, Styrofoam and black plastic in the recycling box, city officials had to reverse that. It was, in the words of city recycling manager Emil Prpic, a “market-driven” eco-dilemma. The problem is, virtually no one wanted to buy those recycled goods. In January, China, which was the giant in the buying market, cracked down on imported plastics. It applied new more stringent purity standards that ruled out most of our plastics.

There must be more buyers than China? Yes. But China has been voracious, consuming more than half the world’s recyclables. There isn’t adequate infrastructure yet to make up for that lost capacity.

So in Hamilton, and many other municipalities, recyclables have to be stored or handled by a third party. Tragically, some of this stuff is ending up in our landfills.

That was bad enough, but then more recently the second whammy hit. The city’s composting plant on Burlington Street East was stinking. It has been odiferous for a long time, but recently the problem has been getting worse. Last month, responding to growing citizen complaints, the plant was closed until a solution can be found.

April 24, 2018

So that food and organic waste you have been separating? It’s going into our only landfill site in Glanbrook. Something like 660 tonnes — daily.

So no food waste recycling. Limited plastics recycling, with the most common types — so-called low grade plastics — being not recyclable because no one wants them. If they’re mixed in with other, legitimate recycling, they contaminate them and have to be sorted by hand otherwise the entire load is useless.

Just to add insult to injury, we’re living under a new government that doesn’t appear to believe the environment matters at all, and next door to a superpower that is losing its mind and racing backwards on environmental protection. (Source: Hamilton Spectator) 

 

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