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Big bucks in recycling

Alberta could gain $700M a year with focus
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GREEN BUCKS – A new study released this week found that Alberta's recycling programs added some 7,500 jobs and $700 million to the economy each year, and could potentially add about twice that much value if the province took steps to maximize recycling.

Alberta could add 5,800 jobs and $700 million to its economy if it got serious about recycling and waste diversion, finds a new report.

The Recycling Council of Alberta released a report by Eunomia Research last week on the economic value of Alberta’s recycling programs. Some 110 delegates were at a session on the report Wednesday at the Edmonton Convention Centre chaired by St. Albert Mayor Cathy Heron as part of the 2019 Alberta Urban Municipalities Association convention.

The report, the first comprehensive look at recycling in Alberta ever done, used surveys and Statistics Canada data to calculate the current volume of material recycled and composted in this province and the jobs, taxes, and investment doing so created. It then estimated the economic effects Alberta would see if it brought in best practices to maximize waste diversion.

The report found that Alberta currently recycles or composts 1.2 million tonnes of waste a year, or about 260 kg per person. That created about 7,500 direct, indirect, and induced jobs, which Christina Seidel of the Recycling Council of Alberta said included everyone from the sorters at bottle depots to the drivers shipping sorted bottles to the restaurant workers serving them lunch. The wages, surpluses, and taxes paid/earned by recycling companies added some $700 million to Alberta’s economy each year.

The report estimated that Alberta could keep another 1.2 million tonnes out of the landfill, creating 5,790 jobs and adding $760 million to the economy, if it brought in a package of best practices for recycling and composting in the next five to 10 years.

“Recycling is not just good for the environment,” Seidel said. “It actually has very strong benefits for the economy as well.”

How to get there

Seidel said the report found Alberta could make the biggest gains in the ICI sector, which currently tend to focus just on cardboard. This could mean municipal legislation to require businesses and organizations to compost (as Calgary has since 2017) or creating ICI-specific targets for recycling companies to meet.

The report found that Alberta could capture more waste if it expanded or created extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs for oil, paint, tires, furniture, appliances, farm plastics, and electronics.

Alberta has the capacity to recycle more oil, paint, tires, and electronics, said Caroline McAuley, chair of the Alberta Recycling Management Authority (which runs the province’s recycling programs for those items). These programs create local jobs and have produced products now found around the world, such as the mulched-rubber shingles used at Scotland’s St. Andrews golf course. Alberta Environment Minister Jason Nixon has expressed interest in expanding these EPR programs.

Other best practices cited by the report included curbside organics collection, mattress and fabric recycling, and landfill bans on construction and demolition waste. The report called for a cost-benefit analysis to find which policies would best capture more material for recycling and create markets for them when adopted provincewide.

When one delegate asked why cities shouldn’t run everything through a single-stream waste-to-energy system instead of recycling, Seidel said doing so was an environmental non-starter.

“It’s never a good thing to actually burn what could be recycled,” she said, and we want to keep materials in circulation as long as possible to reduce costs and waste.

Recycling does have a cost, and municipalities should not have to pay it, Seidel said. If Alberta brought in EPR laws for paper and packaging, it would shift the cost of curbside recycling off cities onto producers and create a provincewide system. B.C. was able to avoid many of the recycling market woes Alberta recyclers now face because it had such a system.

Heron noted that the AUMA was lobbying the province to bring in EPR for packaging.

“Alberta’s the only western province that doesn’t have EPR paper and packaging regulations,” she said, and the province could bring them in without spending more money.

The report is available at bit.ly/2nL9qF5.


Kevin Ma

About the Author: Kevin Ma

Kevin Ma joined the St. Albert Gazette in 2006. He writes about Sturgeon County, education, the environment, agriculture, science and aboriginal affairs. He also contributes features, photographs and video.
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