Bin There, Done That

Inside our ineffective recycling system

- Matthew Halliday

MOST CANADIANS know the ritual: check the pick-up schedule, sort the waste items, clean the jars, make sure the junk mail isn’t stained with coffee grounds. Then fill up the blue box (or blue bag, or blue cart, depending on the city), and on the appointed day, haul it to the curb. It’s an activity that Canadians have participated in eagerly for almost thirty years. Of the three Rs drilled into our heads in school — reduce, reuse, recycle — recycling is the only one that most of us regularly practise. In 2011, according to a survey by Stewardship Ontario, three-quarters of Ontarians considered the weekly act of sorting and disposing as their “primary environmental effort.”

But as much as Canadians love the blue box, “its role in [our] hearts and minds . . . is much larger than its actual environmental impact,” wrote Dianne Saxe, Ontario’s environmental commissioner, in a report last October. In fact, recycling is one of the least environmentally friendly “environ mental” things one can do.