Targeting a Guinness record
Durham Region battery collection program is a smashing success
Durham Region has just thrown down a gauntlet, a waste collection challenge. The sprawling municipality east of Toronto has likely smashed the Guinness World Record for collection of batteries in a 24-hour period.
All that remains for Durham to don its Guinness crown is for the organization’s guardians of truth to verify the documentation.
Durham’s battery collection tally for Nov. 15 was an impressive 5,102 kilograms, says waste operations supervisor Peter Veiga, outstripping a feeble 181.8 kilograms for the existing world record.
How did the municipality’s waste wizards accomplish this feat? By instituting a pilot curbside collection program for batteries during last week’s regular garbage and recycling pickup.
Garbologists know well that if you want residents to dispose of products correctly, you have to make it easy for them, and nothing is simpler than curbside collection.
Durham’s battery program was timed a week after we set clocks back an hour. The reasoning: that’s when people should change their smoke detector batteries, a practice that, of course, raises the question of what to do with the old ones.
Durham offered the answer by distributing a zip-lock, recyclable plastic bag — “The Original Battery Bag” — with images of batteries and a list of program sponsors. Residents were asked to put the bag on top of their blue boxes at curbside.
It was a veritable tsunami of batteries — including rechargeables from cellphones, drills and lanterns — that hit the region’s waste management centre, even though only about 10 per cent of Durham’s 191,000 households participated.
The final haul for the entire program from Nov. 12 to 16 will likely total about 28,000 kilos — an impressive 14 tonnes. The municipality intends to repeat the battery collection next year (March 18-22) after the clocks go forward. Where did Durham waste managers get the idea of going for a Guinness record?
Veiga explains that one of his colleagues noticed that a company had secured a record for collecting waste electronics, which Durham figured they would have easily beaten in one of their own blitzes.
The battery program was already in the works, they made inquiries, and after they learned about the existing 24-hour collection record, they were in, says Veiga.
The $20,000 program will pretty much pay for itself, thanks to the sponsors who contributed either in kind or in funds, Veiga says. They included battery recycler Raw Materials Co., waste collectors Miller and GFL, bag manufacturer Bag to Nature, Covanta Energy, which is building Durham’s energy-fromwaste facility, and Orange Drop (makethedrop.ca), which is the Stewardship Ontario collection network.
The final haul will likely total about 28,000 kilograms
(Stewardship Ontario is the provincially mandated agency that collects funds from industry, including eco-fees, to pay for recycling and end-of-life processing for a range of materials and household hazardous waste.) The idea for the Durham program emerged from conversations at a waste management conference with Cory Graper, who handles sales for Raw Materials, located in Port Colborne, Ont. It’s the only facility anointed by Stewardship Ontario for processing spent singleuse batteries and receiving payments for doing so. The company, which also processes rechargeables, breaks the single-use batteries into steel, agricultural micronutrients for growing corn as a biofuel, and plastic and paper fluff that goes to an energy-from-waste facility. Stewardship Ontario’s Orange Drop sponsored its own battery collection campaign, which ended Nov. 4, in the form of a fundraiser for two charities, the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre and EcoSpark, which helps schools and communities with environmental issues. By downloading a mobile phone app, people bringing used batteries to Orange Drop locations could indicate which charity they supported; 30 cents per battery to a maximum of $15,000 would be credited to one of the two charities. Stewardship Ontario spokesman Paul Gerrard says they were happy with the 50,000 batteries donated, and are looking at repeating the program, perhaps targeting different materials for collection. Raw Materials also works with schools and other organizations who want to use battery collection as a fundraiser. If you’re interested, contact Cory Graper at cgraper@rawmaterials.com. Meanwhile, there are other Guinness recycling and collection records out there to be broken: largest donation of used mobile phones in 24 hours (2,590); most aluminum can tabs collected in one year (2,783,788); most drink cans collected in eight hours (152,800); most plastic bags recycled in eight hours (120,000); and most plastic bottles recycled in eight hours (13,408.19 kilos.) e_moorhouse@sympatico.ca