Transition Brockville / 16 April 2018

How might residential blue box recycling change following China’s decision to limit its intake of the world’s unwanted paper and plastic? What added costs might Brockville residents have to pay?

For the answers to these questions, Transition Brockville has invited Erik Lefebvre, district operations manager at Waste Management in Brockville, to give a talk at our next presentation, Sunday, April 22, at 2 p.m. in the Brockville Public Library. “Brockville is at the dead centre of what’s going on,” Lefebvre said in a conversation with Transition Brockville. In his talk, he’ll explain why.

As outlined in a recent CBC series on recycling, China was taking in about half the world’s unwanted paper and plastic for recycling when it decided last summer it would no longer be the global dump for some 20,000 tons of that material daily.

Sending recyclables to China was a cheap and easy solution for the developed world — including Canada — but a growing environmental nightmare for China. So last July, Beijing issued a list of 24 kinds of solid waste that it would no longer accept from the beginning of 2018. That includes textiles, mixed paper shipments and the low-grade polyethylene terephthalate used in plastic bottles, known as PET. It also imposed strict standards to avoid contaminated waste. China complained that too much of it came uncleaned and unsorted.

“[China’s new policy] is causing giant troubles for our industry,” Lefebvre said.

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