A group of five Greater Toronto area municipalities have signed a deal with Unical, Inc., a Canadian recycled glass processor. Under the plan Unical will be operating a facility to handle glass from the five municipalities by this summer. The five municipalities that are a part of the GTA are Toronto, Hamilton, and the Regions of Peel, York and Durham.
Stewardship Ontario is providing $1.75 million to Unical to purchase processing equipment.
"One of Stewardship Ontario's mandates is to develop and enhance markets for recyclable materials leading to improvements in system cost efficiencies," said Sandra Banks, vice-chair of the board of directors.
"Most people don't know that Stewardship Ontario is an organization of industry stewards that pays half of the net operating cost of the Ontario blue box program. In the past four years, companies that use packaging and printed paper have contributed or committed more than $188 million to municipalities to help pay recycling costs. In this shared system, both industry and municipalities have a stake in driving down costs whenever possible," Banks said.
Stewardship Ontario estimates the investment in the Unical plant will be paid back in under two years. Each of the five municipal partners in the deal stands to save operating costs totaling about $10 million over the seven years of the existing contract.
In total, the five municipalities will supply a minimum of 44,000 metric tons of mixed glass, roughly half of the glass estimated to have been collected in residential recycling programs in all of Ontario last year.
"In fact, when this plant is fully operational, it will have capacity to process much more glass than these initial 44,000 metric tons," said Andre Racine, president of Unical. "We're expecting we'll make rapid progress toward our capacity of 120,000 metric tons because we'll be almost next door to many municipalities that generate a lot of blue box mixed glass. That will save on transportation costs alone."