Right in the centre - Recycling business in big trouble in Manitoba

Details

Published on Friday, April 27, 2018

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner & Press

Recycling is more than just in trouble, it has become a farce. For about 30 years, many well-intentioned Manitobans have expressed their concern for environmental stewardship by faithfully recycling. Beer cans, pop cans, newspapers, books, magazines, steel, lead batteries, household waste, food and other organic waste have been faithfully steered away from the landfills and into the recycling stream.

Manitobans have, without much complaint, and more likely because they don’t know it, have paid two cents per container into a fund administered by Multi-Material Stewardship Manitoba (MMSM). Their rather attractive website can be found at http://stewardshipmanitoba.org.

Deep inside that web site, you can find that MMSM is losing money and we see why I call recycling a farce.

•2015 income $14,926,177

•2015 expenses $16,265,319

•Loss $544,845

•2016 income 15,391,698

•2016 expense $15,064,614

•Loss $137,187

There is a deeper secret buried within the website, in MMSM’s annual report. MMSM is claiming very high recovery rates, laughable rates for many products. People inside the industry will tell you, as will casual observers, that there is no way on God’s green earth that MMSM is recovering the rates of recyclables they are claiming to achieve. Somebody is either misinformed or else they are lying.

MMSM, on page 22 of their report, would have us believe they recover 91.6 per cent of newsprint. That is absolute nonsense. They claim 77 per cent recovery on glass and 62.8 per cent on aluminum beverage cans. I seriously question those figures. Besides, there is little, if any, market for glass.

Recycling is a good thing, as it keeps material out of the landfill and diverts products for re-use. In this part of Manitoba, it costs $75 per tonne to dump stuff at the landfill. Actually, it costs a lot more than that but that is what they charge. So right from the get-go, recyclables are worth $75 per tonne if landfill costs can be avoided. It’s a good premise but there is little follow-up as the trash mountains continue to grow.

An additional problem is that recyclable rules changes every day, as Margaret Wente, a national columnist wrote in a piece this past week on the frustrations and falsehoods about recycling. Wente’s view is insightful and shows that recycling takes a lot of work and is far from sustainable under current models.

Recycling is best done on a very localized basis. Recycling programs would absolutely collapse if dutiful householders didn’t diligently gather, wash, sort etc. The hidden cost in recycling is that it takes a lot of work and there is no immediate return or incentive to anyone in the system, except maybe for the bureaucrats.

Recycling in Manitoba needs to be completely re-done. MMSM either needs to change its focus or it should be shut down. If people truly want a recycling program, then levies will likely increase by a huge amount. The cleaners, sorters and gatherers of recycling will have to be paid. 

At the end of the day, no matter how hard we try, not all items are going to be recyclable. Manitobans must realize that true trash, actual garbage could be clean burned to generate heat and electricity. Scandinavian countries are doing it and so is Korea. To avoid huge transportation costs, the clean burn systems have to be geared to the size of the natural catchment area.