Quebec system is wasteful, inefficient, group says
Quebec’s model of exporting materials seen by critics as wasteful, inefficient
Outside Montreal’s main triage centre for recyclable materials, 6,000 bales of paper and cardboard have accumulated during the last several months, in search of a home. The city’s inability to off-load thousands of tonnes of recyclables after China tightened its quality restrictions is another example of Montreal’s failure to properly manage its garbage, say critics who warn many of those bales could end up in landfills.
“The problem is not with citizens, who are doing their part,” said Karl Ménard, director of the Front québécois pour une gestion écologique des déchets, which advocates for environmentally friendly management of waste.
“The problem is with the business model. We focused on quantity in Quebec, but we forgot to create recycling enterprises. Exporting abroad was seen as a shortterm solution — except when the principal buyers close their doors, we see that we have a large problem, and that’s what we’re living with now.”
The provincial recycling body Recyc-Québec noted that only one-third of Quebec’s fibrous recyclables like paper and cardboard were reused in the province. Between 2010 and 2015, the percentage of those materials exported went from 39 per cent to 49 per cent, primarily to China.
Last fall, China announced it would no longer accept bales of recyclable materials containing more than one per cent in contaminants. Previously, Chinese recyclers staffed with low-wage employees would often re-sort materials sent in to take out contaminants like plastics and metals. But as their standard of living rose, so did wages, reducing profits for recycling centres and their ability to re-triage.
At Montreal’s Centre de tri, located at the southern end of the St Michel Environmental Complex, that meant scrambling to find new buyers. New contacts have been made in India, Indonesia and Korea, Gilbert Durocher, director of the Rebuts Solides Canadiens company that handles the triage of recyclables at the city-owned complex, told Radio-Canada this month. All of the 6,000 bales will be shipped out in the next two to three months, and none will end up in landfill, he said. But reduced prices for the materials means the company will not have its usual profits to share with the city, which in previous years has run up to $2 million a month. Other triage centres in the province are at risk of going under.
Durocher and the operators of the province’s roughly 30 triage centres are asking for subsidies from the Quebec government to modernize their plants so they can provide a product that is more easily sold in Quebec and abroad. Quebec has promised to provide financial aid, but not at the levels the centres say is needed to survive.
Ecologist Ménard notes that paper and cardboard rots, and worries that many of the bales stored outside of the Centre de tri will no longer be of recyclable quality after all their time outdoors.
More important, however, he says shipping our waste thousands of kilometres overseas is not an environmentally responsible method, even if it is reused. The province needs to develop measures to favour the use and marketability of recycled materials so that what is discarded here can be reused here in another form.
“What we are calling the ‘recycling crisis’ — we hope that it will force Quebec to improve its practices,” he said. “We have always believed that when we put things in recycling, that they will be recuperated. But that’s not necessarily so.”
The problem is with the business model. We focused on quantity in Quebec, but we forgot to create recycling enterprises.