At a time when many U.S. state and city recycling support budgets have dwindled, the province of Ontario continues to firm up recycling programs for several secondary commodities.
Gaining much of the attention in Ontario has been the province’s program for “blue box” or curbside recycling, which has caused food, beverage and other consumer products manufacturers to pool their funds to help pay for a province-wide recyclables collection and funding system.
Additionally, though, the Ontario government has helped establish industry funding organizations (IFOs) for the province-wide recycling of tires and used motor oil, including filters and containers.
Speaking to attendees of a session at the Canadian Waste & Recycling Expo in Toronto in early December, Glenda Gies of Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO), North York, described how the quasi-governmental organization has worked with manufacturers, retailers and others to establish IFOs that have in turn designed programs for these commodities.
The WDO receives the authority to form the IFOs when materials are posted to the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights as being mandated for recycling.
In the case of oil, Gies says that mandate requires the recycling of “lubricating oil after it has been used for its designated purpose,” as well as used oil filters and used oil barrels, drums and other containers.
Oil companies and major motor oil retailers (including operators of oil change service chains) are key members of that IFO, known as the Ontario Used Oil Management Association (OUOMA).
Gail Bebee, an OUOMA officer who also works full-time for retailer Canadian Tire, says OUOMA was formed earlier this year. Rather than spending its time designing a program from scratch, the group has worked to bring to Ontario a system that has worked well in Alberta and other western Canadian provinces.
According to Bebee, in the past seven years the Alberta Used Oil Management Association has helped raise that province’s oil container recycling rate to 45 percent from 7 percent; its oil recycling rate from 56 percent to 73 percent; and the oil filter recycling rate from 17 percent to 89 percent.
In the set-up, oil collectors or transporters are paid for materials delivered to a “registered process site,” which could be a re-refiner or a filter or drum recycler.
The funds derive from an environmental handling charge that is collected up front by retailers. Currently, these charges are five cents per liter of oil and 50 cents for a new automotive oil filter.
Bebee says the program’s benefits include the fostering of end markets; the diversion from landfills of unwanted petroleum-contaminated products; and a funding mechanism that is not tampered with each year during the government budgeting process.
Western Canada is also serving as the model for the tire recycling program being established by an IFO known as Ontario Tire Stewardship (OTS).
OTS executive director Bill Pardu says manufacturers and retailers in Ontario are looking at how western Canadian provinces are attaining 80 to 90 percent recycling rates, and quipped that there will probably be no need to “reinvent the wheel” in Ontario.
Retailers will be “front and center,” says Pardu, as collectors of per-tire fees as well as being handlers of most end-of-life tires.
Pardu says the program is being designed to encourage “higher-value” uses of scrap tires, citing crumb rubber markets as meeting this requirement—including in rubberized asphalt, followed by civil engineering uses of tire shreds; the use of shreds in blasting mats and other products; and with tire-derived fuel (TDF) as the least desirable option.
He notes that the province is still collecting information on how much tire recycling capacity exists in the province, acknowledging that “incentives will be required” to boost markets such as those for rubberized asphalt.