The conundrum is even greater than that, however, because most clean quality recyclable plastic itself is just sitting unused, right across Canada, stored in limbo, lacking buyers, making the bleakly futile exercise of pretend recycling also a costly one. There’s a grave problem with all plastic, clean or filthy.
Municipalities with “contaminated” recyclables, and offshore customers for recycled plastic who now reject Canadian garbage-laden material and also balk at our random mixed materials all baled together, know first-hand that the garbage dump era’s “out of sight, out of mind” ethos is with us yet.
Our provincial capital’s increasingly refined waste classifications have reprogrammed a couple generations to not just sort basics like glass, plastics, fibre products and compostable material, but to know right and wrong categories for fluorescent light bulbs, bags of dog poop, clothes dryer lint, cooked or raw meats, personal sanitary products, black plastic, and 172 other specific items, with detailed sub-rules for everything from paint to electronics.
Yet the garbage dump mentality remains a component of Toronto’s “waste management strategy.” After a decade of “world class” Toronto hauling140 truckloads of garbage daily over the border to a site in Michigan, city council in 2006 responded to public outrage, but only by shifting to a closer landfill site, near London. All the while, other Ontario municipalities with dwindling landfill life-spans are contracting private haulers for trash runs to garbage-friendly Michigan, more than making up for Toronto’s lost business.
Half of Muskoka’s residential waste currently goes to landfill, alongside four-fifths of the District’s garbage from institutions, businesses, and industrial operations. There are lots of alternatives, most with big price-tags, each with critics, the best incorporating sound economics, advanced science, and new opportunities.
However, recalibrating how to handle Muskokans’ waste is not a solo mission because most big solutions lie beyond our District’s borders. Last month’s amendment of the Basel Convention on international trade and disposal of hazardous goods by 187 countries can help keep plastic wastes from entering oceans and developed countries from merely exporting waste. The Trudeau Government is readying itself to curb plastic wastes. The Ford Government will implement programs using the “extended-user responsibility” principle so waste disposal costs are borne by those creating packaging rather than municipalities.
Between global economics reconfiguring the waste product market, international treaties newly binding Canada, our national and provincial governments ramping up interventions, and multinational corporations and national retailers reconfiguring operations, we have as many possible plays here as Raptors display on a basketball court.
