City will bury clamshell plastics it paid $330K to keep in storage
Ubiquitous containers were stockpiled in fruitless hopes of viable recycling
After spending $330,000 to store them in hopes of finding a recycling solution, the city will now bury previously collected clamshell plastics.
City officials said they made the decision to dump 2,000 tonnes of the material into landfills starting this month after a concerted effort to land a cost-effective recycling alternative proved in vain.
“This is the first time we’ve had to landfill material due to market issues, and we are just as disappointed as many Calgarians will be about this,” Sharon Howland, leader of program management with waste and recycling services, said in a statement on the City of Calgary’s website.
“Our priority has always been to keep all recyclable materials out of the landfill.”
The city, she said, examined 50 alternatives but none was feasible in reducing the stockpile of plastic packaging used primarily to contain produce and baked goods.
She noted the city and its material sorting partner, Cascades Recovery, found a company last spring, Merlin Plastics, to recycle the clamshell plastics collected by the blue box program since last April and into the future.
But the volume of the plastics previously collected since September 2017 that had been stored in 100 semi-trailers rented by the city proved too much to be disposed of in a cost-effective manner, said Howland.
Burying the material — which accounts for one to two per cent of all recyclables collected — will cost a total of $130,000, while continuing to store them at the Shepard Landfill site for another year would be a $300,000 annual expense, said city officials.
Last spring, Coun. Ward Sutherland said the city should cut its losses by either incinerating or landfilling the clamshell material if a recycler wasn’t found soon.
Clamshell plastics’ adhesives and washing requirement make them more difficult to recycle.
Recycling most materials collected by North American municipalities became more challenging and expensive after China began refusing to accept many of them in late 2017.
The city says it now receives 60 per cent less revenue for all of its recycled material than it did before late 2017.
To compensate for that loss, the city increased monthly blue bin fees by 30 cents.
Ultimately, the solution to reducing the volume of consumer waste and recyclables lies with producers who should also share in the cost of disposing them, say city officials, who add that would come through provincial legislation.
“It puts the fiscal and environmental costs into the hands of the producers of the packaging,” said Howland. “We’re very hopeful this new government will have a very close look at the work being done and move forward with that regulation.”
Packaging producers are willing to process and market those used materials if sufficient economies of scale exist to encourage investment in that direction, she continued.
B.C. is already using the extended producer responsibility model to great effect, said Howland.
The city’s blue bin program annually collects 55,000 tonnes of material.