Albertans are set to recycle a mind-boggling two billion beverage containers this year, which is great news for the environment, says the province’s bottle-depot board.
Alberta has already recycled 1.4 billion beverage containers as of August, and the Beverage Container Management Board expects the province will pass two billion by the end of the year. This would be both a provincial and a national record, said spokesperson Leanne Stangeland.
Two billion containers works out to about 550 per Albertan, the Gazette estimates. A line of two billion pop cans laid end to end would wrap around the Earth about 5.6 times.
Alberta’s container recycling rate has slowly crept up for some time now, Stangeland said, and was at about 1.9 billion last year.
St. Albert businessman Sam Mahal said he’s seen similar trends at his Campbell Park Bottle Depot – residents have cashed in about a million containers so far this year, and they keep pouring in.
“Every year, it’s becoming more and more,” Mahal said.
The province’s decision to change the deposit system in 2008 is one reason for the increase, Mahal said. Instead of getting five, 10 or 20 cents for a container depending on its size and content, now you get either a dime or a quarter for anything under or over a litre.
“It’s a lot of money if you throw it in the garbage,” Mahal said.
That cash value means people are more willing to recycle their empties, he continued. His depot doesn’t get any deposit-carrying containers from the city’s recycling depot nowadays, compared to the $200 to $300 week they got in the past.
“Now, everyone saves the bottles.”
Better service also helps. Alberta has about 216 bottle depots, which makes recycling more convenient, said board president Malcolm Kirkland. Some have started to use automatic sorters for faster service.
“A depot can literally be run on a couple of (computer) tablets,” he said.
Other factors contributing to the success include Alberta’s large, educated population and its deposits on milk jugs and cartons – the latter of which many other provinces do not have, he continued.
Albertans currently return about 83 per cent of their beverage containers, Stangeland said – a bit shy of the provincial target of 85.
“We’re getting pretty close to it.”
The return rate was about 75 per cent in 2008.
Recycling a tonne of aluminum pop cans instead of landfilling it prevents about 9.8 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, reports the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Doing the same for a tonne of glass beer bottles prevents 0.3 tonnes.
Better public education would help the province keep more beverage containers out of the dump, Stangeland said, especially tetra-packs, which many residents forget can be recycled.
“If they can drink out of it, they can return it,” she said.
Residents should remember to wash out their milk containers to keep the smell down and to keep their trash separate from their bottles, Mahal said. Pre-sorting your containers by size can cut your time at the depot in half, he added.
The board has no plans to expand the deposit system to other products, Kirkland said, but is looking at a swipe-card system that would let people cash in containers any time of day.
Visit abcrc.com for a full list of containers accepted at bottle depots.
