IT'S NOT GARBAGE

There is gold in those waste streams.  In our throwaway society, we are burying, burning and dumping materials that we should be reusing or recycling.  In the process, we are wasting energy, non-renewable resources, polluting our environment and undercutting job creation.

Fortunately, there is increasing recognition that what we call “waste” is actually valuable if we take the right approaches.  First, we have to send the right signals by making it more costly to dispose of these materials than it is to repurpose them.  This is already happening naturally as it becomes more and more expensive to develop landfills or other disposal methods. 

But the best way to really make businesses aware of the value of what they and their customers are throwing away is to put in place full (or “extended”) producer responsibility.  In other words, the company that produces a product is responsible for dealing with not just production byproducts and waste, but with packaging and the product components themselves at the end of their lifespan. In particular, it would  require that those companies importing goods into Ontario are ensuring a new future for these products when they are at the end of their lifespan.   The result is a powerful incentive to reduce unnecessary waste, to design products for easy disassembly or reconstruction, and to avoid over packaging.  It enshrines the “polluter pays” principle to ensure goods are not just dumped in Ontario’s garbage.  It is a concept that the Ontario government is looking at more broadly integrating into its provincial waste disposal strategy and one that is already reflected in the province’s waste disposal fees added to electronics and tires.

For workers, this approach also opens up whole new employment opportunities in disassembly and re-use of materials. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that recycling creates five times as many jobs as landfilling, for example.

The City of Toronto, meanwhile, wants to divert 70% of its waste from landfill, but often has to ship materials thousands of kilometres for recycling.  While Canadian forestry mills shut down, Toronto ships paper to Korea for recycling.  We need to bring these jobs home by increasing our capacity to harvest and reuse these “waste” materials.  Similarly, many electronics are shipped to the Third World for disassembly and recycling.  But this process is often done by hand with crude tools and with absolutely no safety equipment or other environmental safeguards.  The result is a system that may be causing as much environmental and human health harm as good. 

Greater reuse and recycling of waste is also an effective way to reduce energy use.  For the most commonly recycled materials, making products from recycled materials saves 35-90 percent of the energy used to extract, refine and manufacturer materials from virgin sources.  These energy savings are also far greater than the energy produced by so-called “energy from waste” incineration projects.

There's a bright jobs future in what we used to call garbage.