St.Albert's Recycling Changes

We’re all familiar with reduce, reuse, and recycle. Now, communities are having to rethink waste management, too.

The St. Albert Landscape

The new recycling rules in St. Albert and elsewhere are a response to policy changes halfway around the world. In early 2018, China implemented restrictions on recycling imports through its National Sword policy. With a single stroke, the world’s largest importer of recyclables banned the import of a wide range of plastic and paper for recycling, as well as unsorted mixed loads of different kinds of plastic and paper. Additionally, China has imposed stricter limits on the amount of contamination allowed—food scraps and other non-recyclable waste that get mixed in with recycling. For the Chinese, it was just one of several recent initiatives designed to make their country greener and cleaner. For us, it means we now have to do a much better job of sorting our garbage and recycling.

The move, which was announced July 2017, has left the recycling industry in North America scrambling and has rippled through the recycling supply chain, all the way down to the local level. While Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) have hired more staff and slowed conveyor belts to improve the sorting process, communities like St. Albert have little choice but to pass on some responsibility to residents.

“We just want to make sure that what we collect can be recycled,” says Olivia Kwok, supervisor of St. Albert’s waste and diversion programs. “We don’t want to keep taking things that can’t be recycled.” Early in November, the new restrictions led to a number of blue bags being stickered and left at the curb. But with the assistance of the City, its website, and the Be Waste Wise app, Kwok says, residents have largely been able to adapt. For the sake of efficiency, the initial stickers were colourful but non-descriptive, as collection workers didn’t have time to explain why bags were rejected. But soon, we can expect to see new stickers with checkboxes indicating problematic contents to help further ease residents into a new way of recycling.

DID YOU KNOW?Your green organics cart isn’t just for grass clippings and food waste. According to the Be Waste Wise “What Goes Where?” sorting list, these oft-trashed items can be composted:

• Solidified cooking oil

• Shredded paper

• Paper towels

• Coffee grounds and paper filters

• Paper food containers

• Napkins and tissues

• Tea bags

• Greasy pizza boxes

• Compostable bags

Residential Recycling

Whatever confusion St. Albertans have experienced, it’s been felt elsewhere, too. With contractors like GFL

Environmental no longer accepting items that can’t be sold locally or exported, many municipalities have had little choice but to fall in line. And so the blue bags and brown and green carts lining St. Albert streets on collection days are similar to what residents are now putting out in Fort Saskatchewan, Strathcona County, Leduc, Spruce Grove, and other municipalities. And like St. Albert, those communities have made necessary changes in the past year to what can and can’t go into the recycling bag. “They have adjusted their programs as well, to ensure that items put into blue bags can be recycled,” Kwok explains.

Surmounting the Waste Heap

Ultimately, though, all the attention given to waste diversion and recycling possibly obscures the real problem—the enormous amount of waste we create. Obviously, diversion is important, even necessary. But diversion doesn’t mean permanent. What’s recycled today may very well end up in the landfill tomorrow in a different form. In the waste hierarchy —commonly depicted as a pyramid, with disposal at the bottom as the least favoured action for dealing with waste— diversion is in the middle. The best way to deal with waste, in fact, is not to generate it in the first place.

“Reduction is at the top and that is where our focus has to be,” Seidel explains. “Unfortunately we’re very quick to jump down the hierarchy to diversion, because that’s a little bit easier

to wrap our heads around, and it’s also what we’re more comfortable with.” It may require some significant changes in our purchasing and consumption habits, but there are many benefits of waste reduction and prevention: less pollution, less demand on natural resources, and less money spent on consumer goods and waste management programs.

The recent change to the recycling program in St. Albert may be inconvenient, but it’s already having the positive effect of getting people to think more about where their waste goes after they put it out. “We do hope that people consider waste reduction, maybe even changing how they buy things,” says Kwok. “The biggest thing that we’re trying to emphasize is to reduce the amount of waste you’re generating.” t8n