The inefficiency of the sow's ear

by Jay Arthur


Dear Mr. Premier
I know you and your environment minister are kind of busy with all the fallout (pardon the pun) from the nuclear power go-ahead-without-a-proper-EA decision, but I would like to draw your attention to something on the waste front.
I would have addressed this to the environment minister directly, but we are getting the impression that all decisions of any consequence are coming from your office, and the problem really lies with the legislation, anyway. It has merely been compounded by the personnel changes, both at the cabinet table and at the top in the environment ministry bureaucracy.
The good thing is that you can blame the Tories. The legislation was developed on their watch after all, and with the front entranceway of the ministry being refitted with a revolving door during the Tory years at Queen's Park, it has become pretty clear no one was watching.
As a result, we have what can best be described as a sow's ear of a Waste Diversion Act that two (so far) Liberal ministers have attempted to turn into a silk purse. It can't be done.
But what really rankles is that now we have all this talk about best practices being used as funding criteria, which effectively sets one program against another in the fight for industry dollars.
And to add insult to injury, the previous minister's push for reasonable costs means 2006 will be used as the year by which municipal "efficiency" will be judged.
Here's where the irony kicks in.
Try telling anyone that the current system itself is not efficient and it is tantamount to sacrilege.
Part of the reason for that is the lack of efficiency in the design of the sow's ear. Any system with payment based on recovered tonnage is going to be biased toward heavy materials.
Find another (and better) way to collect one of those materials and you decrease the recovered tonnage. Not good; the numbers would appear to be going down.

Conversely, if you added a heavy material, the tonnage would go up, self-congratulatory press releases could be  issued, speeches could be given about what a great program it is and everyone would be happy. Not really.
So what if the beer guys, for example, said to heck with the deposit system and told everyone to throw their beer bottles in the blue box. Why should the Beer Store pay for all of the cost of recovering its containers when the other guys (the liquor board comes to mind) only has to pay half--and then only on what is recovered (another design flaw in the sow's ear).
The result would be a huge increase in recovered tonnages, and a whole bunch of extra, broken coloured glass that we would have to find a market for that we could honestly describe as "recycling". We might even spend millions of dollars on market research.
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario is well aware of the troubles with glass of course, and for years a has been calling for a better way to handle that material in general and booze bottles in particular.
The chances of the brewers giving up a on system for which they enjoy great kudos and a lot of credibility in stewardship arguments are likely pretty slim, but the same thing is already happening in the bottled water industry.
One company has figured out it can sell its 15-litre water bottles for less if it dumps the deposit and lets the municipal system handle the empties. It also means it only pays half of the cost because of the largest flaw in the sow's ear design-- the fact it only covers half the cost and only covers what is recovered and successfully marketed in the blue box.
0000The supreme irony of course is that if the Province had the intestinal fortitude to adopt the better way to recover glass (and we all know how to do that even if few will admit it, out of deference to the sow's ear) the efficiencies would improve, the contamination would decrease and the  revenues would increase.
Oh, and by the way, overall recovery rates would improve, too.

A WEEE mistake:
(In my April column I suggested CSR had been "given the nod" on electronics, implying the organization has been named as the industry funding organization (and was thus a good bet for the HHW IFO. This was wrong. What CSR got was a research contract. We are still waiting to see who the IFO will be for electronics.)