Whatever happened to source separation?

by Jay Arthur

I was wallowing in nostalgia the other day, thinking about the good old days of recycling, when I came across this brochure.
Be a Good Sort, it said. It urged a thing called source separation.
So, when did the rules change?
All of a sudden, we are going back the other way. Commingling is now the buzzword.
Did I miss something here?
First it was the fibre box. That made sense from the point of view that it was possible to divert more materials from the household, although mixing the chaff (boxboard) with the wheat (newsprint) was not always that popular with newspaper mills who wanted the cleaner fibres in the higher grade paper.  It didn't matter so much if you just wanted material to make paperboard.
Accordingly, the prices paid for commingled materials reflected the fact that someone had to further sort the materials to get the good stuff out.
Then it was plastics.
Companies came along and offered to take all the plastics a program could collect. They didn't always want all those plastics; it was the relatively juicy PET and HDPE bottles the buyers were after, and they were willing to accept some chaff. We weren't always sure what happened to some of that chaff, but who cared? It was taken away and it wasn't in the landfill - not the local one, anyway.
Then wet/dry came along and there was a new world order. There was a lot of argument about the number of streams, but the idea of getting all the materials from the householder and then sorting it made a lot of sense. It got the organics out of the garbage which was a major environmental plus. Whether the curbside savings and the increased diversion were outweighed by the cost of sorting the dry stream in the plant was again the big question.
Then of course there was the idea that you just took the garbage bag and through a mixture of technology and salesmanship tried to persuade people that you could produce not only good compost and clean recyclables but divert inordinate amounts of waste from landfill. A lot of people remain to be convinced on any of those fronts.

Now we hear from the nation's largest city that it is looking at commingling the fibres and the containers into one recycling stream and building a plant to "de-mingle" them, so to speak.
This is part of a laudable effort to increase diversion by collecting organics, recyclables and waste in a three-steam collection over two weeks.
That there will be savings at the curb appears undeniable. The question as always is what happens to the quality of the fibre stream when it is shoved into a truck compactor with the pop cans, glass and plastics.
One assumes that question will be answered once the program gets under way next year.
What else can be done with the rest of the recyclables all those homeowners have so lovingly separated from the fibres?
If the liquor and pop bottles were removed there would be a lot fewer liquid residues to degrade the fibres.
The main reason for getting the pop and liquor bottles out of there, however,  is that scourge of any multi-material recycling system - glass. It contaminates other materials and can cause major grief to sorting equipment. No one would weep if it were gone.
There may well be savings at the curb if glass is thrown in with other materials but the efficiencies on the street can quickly be outweighed by the extra costs in the recycling plant. And the more we commingle materials, the lower the final use of the material. So we end up with glass being used as an aggregate substitute rather than for making new glass. That's not really recycling, is it?
Also, the loss of the intrinsic value in a material never seems to be included in the equation.
Of course, there are other ways to collect and reuse or recycle empty containers, even though no one (in Ontario, anyway) seems to want to talk about that.
Maybe it's a coincidence that now there is at least a possibility that those who use the packaging which finds its way into the blue box may have to contribute to recycling costs, the old ideals of source separation are being questioned, and dollar costs are paramount.
(Is it a given then that any system that industry is asked to support will be, de facto, inefficient - on principle?)
And the public, who were urged so earnestly to play their part, and to take some responsibility for their waste, are now being told to dump it onto whatever container or system is the flavour of the month.
It's no wonder I'm feeling out of sorts, nowadays.