RECYCLING
Plastics piling up with nowhere to go
About 500 tons of recycling is accumulated in Medicine Hat every month, and plastics are currently creating a challenge, says the local depot.
Plastics account for about 30 tons, and at the moment there is nowhere for it to go, said Randy Wong, district operations manager, Environmental 360 Solutions in Brier Park, where your blue bin content is sorted.
For many years plastic was shipped to China and in some cases the contamination of that plastic was up to 30 per cent, said Wong. China has now established new specifications and will only accept contaminants of up to 0.05 per cent.
A piece of cardboard in with a bale of plastic is considered a containment and that can result in the whole load being refused. If the originating location of the contaminated bale can be identified there is the possibility all recycling from that location could be refused in future, said Wong.
Medicine Hat has 200 tons of plastics stored. That represents about 15 per cent of the overall volume processed, said Wong.
There is hope on the horizon. An operation in B.C. is expected to open soon where this can be resorted into uncontaminated bales that can then be sold.
“It (recycling) is a commodity,” said Wong.
There are brokers who deal with countries such as China, India and Malaysia to purchase recycling from countries such as Canada. The price for the commodity fluctuates based on the volume those countries will accept and how much they will pay for it.
Medicine Hat deals with “brokers” to get a price for a specific commodity for a certain period of time. There are times when it may be worth stockpiling to wait for a better price from a broker but you have to determine the cost of storage while you wait, said Wong. There is also the possibility of selling for less than the cost to collect it.
At the moment commodity prices are low for all recycling, said Wong.
Over Christmas, three times the usual recycling volume was collected in Medicine Hat. It overwhelmed the processing system with 10 employees that do the sorting. Wong says they had to bale it and stack it. They are currently unbaling and sorting it now while it is a little quieter.
Since the blue bin curbside recycling was introduced last May an additional 220 tons of recycling per month has been collected, said Wong.
While plastics may be graded in seven categories Medicine Hat does not currently have the capability to sort them into each category.
One of the biggest challenges and expense is people putting items in the recycling bins where they should not go. Sometimes there is wood, Styrofoam and empty paint cans. Wood can be recycled but would have to be taken somewhere else in the city, Styrofoam cannot be recycled and leaving it alongside the bin means a truck has to be sent to take it to the landfill. Tin cans can be recycled but paint cans have to go to a hazardous waste site.
Wong pulls at the plastic bin liner in his office and suggests it is a product of recycling several times over. At some point, he says, it can't be recycled anymore and has to go to the landfill. Even recycling cardboard may not be feasible in future if the energy costs of recycling it are more than making it new.
The city's website has details about recycling.
https://www.medicinehat. ca/government/departments/ environmental-utilities/solidwaste-utility/recyclables-collection