The panic at Queen's Park as recycling's reality hits home

by Jay Arthur

After more than a decade of steward-ship talk in Ontario, it was looking almost certain that something at least might find its way into municipal coffers to offset recycling costs. It wasn't full stewardship--heck, it wasn't even close--but it was something.
Now, who knows if it will ever happen?
The way this thing has dragged on it's like a classical Greek tragedy, combined with a biblical parable: Sophocles meets Job.
After years of false starts, promises, more false starts, and more promises--and many years spent wandering in the wilderness, we actually got some legislation in place last year. All that was left was the paperwork.
More than a year has passed and we are still spinning our wheels.
There are many things wrong with the Waste Diversion Act (see my tirade in the April 2003 PPSReview) but the latest, and possibly most serious obstacle is the realization that the blue box costs a lot more than everyone thought. Now that someone has actually done a province-wide, in-depth survey of true costs, the reality of recycling has hit home.
How much more it costs is something we are left to speculate about as no one is releasing the numbers just yet. But, by all accounts, the results of the financial data call set blue box costs at least 25 per cent higher than previously estimated and the producers are not happy. Can you blame them? They are still recovering from being told by Stewardship Ontario/CSR that the numbers used in the Waste Diversion Organization reports of 2000 were...well let's say "optimistic". Those costs started at a little over $60 million per year and decreased to just over $40 million as efficiencies kicked in. In the 2003 blue box plan, however, the costs started in the same place, but ended up at over $100 million!
That was a big enough blow. Now they are being told that the estimates for current costs were way off the mark. By the time you read this we may know exactly by how much.
You may recall the $62.5 million figure that was used for

the net recycling cost estimates was as a result of an agreement reached by the folks at SO/CSR and municipal representatives from AMO about revenues, based on a rolling average. They had to negotiate the figure because they each had different figures. The SO/CSR estimate for revenues was 33 per cent higher than AMO's estimate, hence the net costs were much lower. You would have thought that given the recent history of the SO/CSR estimates that they might have leaned toward the AMO number. But it was not to be.
So after 10 years of estimating recycling costs, and no real effort to assess the actual costs, the true number comes as a bit of a shock.
You can understand that the brand owners who have finally committed to paying half of that cost are a little concerned. You can understand that the folks at SO/CSR are a little concerned. And you can understand that the Province, feeling the heat from the producers, is a little concerned. You can understand the concern but what on earth is this "cost containment strategy"?
Did municipalities become profligate overnight, wallowing in inefficiency and waste? I don't think so.
All that happened was that the truth finally surfaced about how much it costs to collect empty containers at the curb. (We can hardly blame this on fibres, not with old newsprint selling for close to a hundred bucks a tonne).
Nothing has changed. We just have the facts now. The principles of product stewardship, which are embodied, albeit imperfectly, in the Waste Diversion Act, haven't changed. Industry agreed to pay half. So industry should pay half.
With municipal budgets being squeezed more and more by the feds downloading onto the Province and the Province downloading onto local governments, has it not occurred to anyone that perhaps municipalities already have "cost containment strategies" in place?

If this is just a way to allow industry to wriggle out of the 50/50 split by reducing the items covered then it should be fought every step of the way. And the Province should be standing up for its own legislation, not undermining it.