A Word About Recycling with Ollie Maier

I recently found in a Resource Recycling newsletter article that Ontario is starting to address a new challenge and it has nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic.

The article started, “Ontario businesses, municipalities and consumers have been diverting a wide range of materials from our landfills for years in an effort to minimize waste.”

However, they noted their diversion amount has leveled-off, their costs to taxpayers are increasing, and their landfills are rapidly filling up.

According to the article, the 14 million Ontarians who live in this province generate close to 2,200 pounds of waste per person each year. During the last 10 years, their waste diversion rate (recycling) has stalled at 30%. However, officials there hope to increase its overall recycling rate to 80% by 2050.

 To accomplish this goal, their plan is to create market incentives by making individual producers of designated materials responsible and accountable for their products and packaging through the entire life cycle of those items.

They have identified four main programs to work on. They are: 1) used tires, 2) electrical and electronic equipment waste 3) municipal hazardous or special waste and 4) blue box, a residential curbside program for paper products and packaging.

For the tires, a fee is charged to the producers to help pay for tire recycling including tire haulers, collectors and rubber processors. Tire producers can also establish their own collection and management systems.

With this recycling effort, both businesses and customers should benefit as Ontario’s tire recycling system continues to collect, transport, process and recycle millions of tires.

Batteries are also included on the list of things to have special emphasis on July 1, 2020. Then on Jan. 1, 2021, the effort on waste electrical and electronic equipment program will start. And finally, their residential curbside program for packaging and paper products will become effective between 2023 and 2025.

In developing the plan, the organizers of it quickly learned that it is crucial to work closely and collaboratively with industry throughout the entire transition process. They found the relationships they established allowed them to address operational problems during the transition period to minimize market disruptions.

They also discovered that communication is the best and most effective compliance tool for managing transition. When people understood the "what" and "why" of the effort, they were much more willing to participate. This is true of many efforts and we wish them success in their’s.

In other news, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day is on April 22. Earthday.org is the hub of Earth Day activities. Make sure to keep visiting the website for daily challenges as we count down to April 22.

Their site is quite extensive, so be sure you have ample time if you really want to see everything… maybe a good way to spend some time during our stay-at-home effort.

Till next week, do have an enjoyable and safe one.

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Ollie is a local citizen concerned with the environment and helping others. A retired Air Force fighter and instructor pilot, he is a graduate of Leadership San Marcos and received his degrees at Texas State University where he worked on staff before totally retiring. For questions or comments, he invites you to call him at 512-353-7432.