Toronto Adds Tubs and Lids

The City of Toronto has added margarine and yogurt tubs and lids and other consumer items made from Nos. 4 and 5 plastic to its curbside program in April.

The city is looking not only to divert more material from its waste stream, but is also confident that the markets for these plastics will be sustainable.

An article in the Toronto Globe and Mail points out that the City of Ottawa had been collecting such material for nine years before abandoning the practice in 2004.

Officials from that city tell the newspaper that Ottawa spent some $1.1 million in 2003 to collect and process those materials, while they would have paid only $240,000 to dispose of the plastics. A major Montreal-based consumer of the materials shut its doors in 2002, hurting the city’s end markets.

But the oil price spike of 2004 and 2005 has created hope in Toronto that the time is right to add No. 4 (LDPE) and No. 5 (Polypropylene) to its curbside mix.

Currently, though, the market for tubs and lids has not risen to the same peaks that are being reached by the more common No. 1 (PET) and No. 2 (HDPE) post-consumer plastics.

Toronto solid waste planning official Geoff Rathbone tells the Globe and Mail that “recycling markets evolve over time,” and, “By bringing the material into the marketplace with a major supplier like Toronto, we feel we’re also going be developing demand capacity.”

Ontario-based recycling company Haycore Ltd. has agreed to buy tubs and lids collected not only by Toronto residents, but also by residents of programs in several other Canadian municipalities as well as Boston and Chicago in the United States.

The City of Toronto, which has no landfill of its own, will also receive rebates from the Waste Diversion Ontario arm of the Ministry of the Environment for increasing its landfill diversion rate.