Juice boxes, wine bottles lag behind beer bottle returns

Metro Vancouver residents are quick to return their empty beer bottles to local liquor stores but aren’t as ready to haul their wine and cooler bottles and juice boxes to the local depot.

Metro Vancouver’s waste committee heard Thursday that while there’s a 92.6 per cent recovery rate for beer bottles by Canada’s National Brewers, Encorp Pacific is seeing only an 80.1 per cent return rate for other containers.

This is partly because many containers are collected through the municipal blue box system, said Scott Fraser, president and chief executive officer of Encorp Pacific. But it’s also because while people are well- versed in returning beer bottles to liquor stores, many people are not in the habit of hauling their items to a depot. “A depot is more natural model but takes a learned behaviour,” Fraser told the Metro waste committee Thursday.

Surrey, Vancouver and the North Shore have the lowest recovery rates in Metro Vancouver, Fraser said, mainly because of a limited number of depots per population.

He noted they’re playing catch- up in fast- growing Surrey, while it’s hard to site depots in parts of the North Shore, such as Lynn Valley, or west of Cambie Street in Vancouver, because of zoning restrictions, the high cost of land or neighbour complaints.

More than 155 million containers aren’t collected in Metro Vancouver, with about one- third of those in Surrey and one- quarter in Vancouver.

But Fraser added they are making headway in improving those stats with a program to upgrade local depots and encourage municipalities to accept and install free streetside recycling bins beside garbage cans.