Short-term garbage fix
HRM ships plastics material to landfill out of province
Halifax Regional Municipality has found a short-term fix for a long-term plastics problem.
The municipality is shipping some of its stockpiled film plastics to another province to be buried in a landfill. Neither Coun. Tony Mancini, chairman of the city’s environment and sustainability committee, nor Matt Keliher, HRM’s solid waste manager, would say which provincial jurisdiction is accepting the city’s plastics.
“Not at this point, we are not going to release that,” Keliher said Thursday of the identity of the recipient province.
“Nova Scotia is the only province that I am aware of that has a ban on film plastics going into a landfill,” he said. “All the other provinces and the other (outof-province) municipalities, when they have an issue with some material that they can’t find a market for or it’s just bad material, they can just put it in a landfill. They don’t have to ask for special permission like we do here in Nova Scotia, and wait five or six months and still not hear anything back from the province.”
The problem surfaced in July when China told the World Trade Organization that it would cease to accept shipments of waste plastic, including shopping bags and plastic wraps, and other materials by Dec. 31, 2017 because of environmental and health concerns.
Keliher said China had been importing about half of the world’s raw recyclable materials and repurposing the materials to other products or for use as fuel.
“The challenge is when half of the world’s demand evaporates, you now have half of the world’s supply trying to find a home. That really turns the tables on the producers of the recyclable materials, the municipalities and the provinces.”
The city, the landfill and Miller Waste, the company that partners in processing HRM’s recyclables at a facility in Bayers Lake, reached out to the Environment Department in late August. They requested provincial permission to allow some stockpiled plastics picked up through curbside collection to be dispersed to local landfills. The department still has not responded.
“The film plastics that we received over the last couple of months, we’ve been able to move that to another facility,” Keliher said. “We’ve actually been able to clean out all the good plastic that we have. It was just the 300 tonnes that has been sitting there for three or four months at least, that was the request to Nova Scotia Environment to allow that to be put into a local landfill. We have yet to hear back from them.”
Keliher said there is typically contamination on the film plastic side.