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There are certain collective delusions all societies rely on to survive — little lies we all quietly agree to look past to make it through our everyday. In Ontario, for decades, one of those lies was this: that most of the plastic packaging you clean and separate every week, that travels from your blue box to your curb and into a waste collection truck, eventually gets turned into something new.

It’s the kind of fib John Mullinder, who spent 30 years in the paper recycling industry in Canada, calls a “little green lie,” (which also happens to be the title of his book), a nice little fiction that makes us all feel better about our lives. The truth, of course, is a lot less pretty. The vast majority of plastic packaging produced and sold not just in Ontario, but across Canada, never gets recycled. Instead, most of it ends up in landfills or in the environment or burned for fuel. “It’s just a one-way ticket to garbage,” said Karen Wirsig, the plastics program manager at Environmental Defence, an NGO.

In 2019, Canada produced about 1.9 million tonnes of plastic packaging, according to a recent report commissioned by the Canada Plastics Pact. Of that, the authors estimate, just 12 per cent was sent for recycling and an even smaller portion was turned into something new.

The numbers are significantly better for some categories, like plastic bottles and rigid plastics. But for others they are worse, much worse, in some cases.

“Things like film bags, plastics that are used for packaged meat, anything that’s flexible … the recycling rate for that’s like one or two per cent,” said a recycling industry insider, who was granted anonymity in order to speak frankly. “The bottom line is that, overall, the national recycling rate on packaging is s—t.”

What that means is that every year more plastic is entering the market in Ontario, wrapped around more items in more ways, and every year more of it is getting thrown away, either by consumers directly or by processers somewhere in the recycling chain. All that plastic is now jamming Ontario’s already overflowing landfills or leaking into the environment, clogging up waterways and tangling in trees. “Plastics,” said Mullinder, “are the problem child of the Ontario blue box.”

Of course, none of those problems are new. Reports on abysmal plastics recycling rates have circled the public consciousness for years. But what is different now, perhaps for the first time ever, is that they don’t look necessarily impossible to solve. There are cracks now in the collective delusion, signs the lie might not hold and that something might actually get done.

Some major manufacturers have committed themselves to simplified and streamlined (although entirely voluntary) packaging principles. The federal government is promising aggressive new plastics regulation by the end of the year, and provincially the Ford government recently approved, after a contentious process and a series of late amendments, a complete overhaul of Ontario’s curbside recycling regime.

Taken together, some believe, those moves could lead to a sea change in plastics recycling in Ontario. By 2030, they argue, there should be fewer single-use plastics on the market, more high-quality plastics in the average blue bin, and an unprecedented surge in plastics recycling rates.

“In the not too distant future, we collectively will be looking at this time where we would use something (made) from scratch, put a lot of energy into it … and just throw it away, as something of a … heresy,” said Steven Guilbeault, the federal environment minister, in an interview with the Star. “I think we are moving into a world where this idea of ‘waste’ will be something of the past.”

But others are far more skeptical. They see industry moves toward “sustainable” plastics as the latest in a long series of cons meant to trick consumers into believing plastic products are far greener than they are. They’re also not confident that governments have picked the right tools to get the job done or that they will be tough enough to withstand the inevitable industry backlash.

“Politicians are so terrified to do anything contrary to business interests,” said Rod Muir, a former waste campaigner for Sierra Club Canada and the founder of Waste Diversion Toronto. “Business gets a pretty free hand to do what they want. … And (that’s why) we’ve gotten to the sh—show that we’re in now.”

At the heart of the dispute is a fundamental disagreement about the role of plastics in Ontario society. Some — environmentalists and activists primarily — see them as a harm that needs to be limited. Others, largely, but not exclusively, in the plastics and manufacturing industries view them as a crucial tool with a post-use problem, one that can and is being addressed by better technology and co-operation.

The stakes for Ontario in that fight are high. The province is set to run out of landfill space by 2032, and other countries, like China, are now increasingly unwilling to take our plastic trash. There’s money at stake, too, as well as something deeper, more elemental, and harder to pin down.

Recycling is part of a compact we make with government. It’s a deal that says we do our part for the environment because we assume, that on the other side, they’re doing theirs. The fact that so little plastic gets recycled today, after decades in the blue bin, undermines the public faith in that deal; it risks the integrity of the system as a whole.

The delusion isn’t there anymore, in other words. The question now is, what are we going to see on the other side?

Ontario’s curbside recycling system, or, to be more precise, systems, was developed for a different world, one where most homeowners got a daily paper or two, many subscribed to multiple magazines and plastic packaging was simple and comparatively limited. In that world, Ontario’s recycling infrastructure didn’t need to be complicated. Paper is pretty straightforward to recycle, as are most glass and metal containers. The hodgepodge system that developed, where more than 240 municipalities were each responsible for creating their own recycling rules and programs, was, generally speaking, up to the job.

That all began to change sometime in the past 20 years, according to Calvin Lakhan, the co-investigator at York University’s Waste Wiki project, as print media declined and the plastics packaging industry boomed. “Over the past 10 years, we’ve had something called an evolving tonne,” he said. “And the evolving tonne is basically a different way of saying that the blue box of today is fundamentally different than the blue box of say, 10 or 15 years ago.”

Today, Ontario recyclers collect considerably less paper than they did 10 years ago and much more plastic. The problem is plastic is more complicated to recycle than paper. It also costs more to recycle and the end markets aren’t nearly as strong. (In 2020, during the pandemic, the average price for a tonne of recovered flexible plastic on the Ontario commodities market was negative $21 a tonne).

In Toronto, which has a large, relatively unified collection and recycling system, the overall plastics recycling numbers are considerably better than they are for the province as a whole. According to the city, 67 per cent of the plastics recovered from blue bins eventually got shipped for recycling in 2021. But even in Toronto, the numbers on flexible plastics were pretty rough. Only 20 per cent of the almost 3,000 tonnes of that material collected through the blue box last year was baled and shipped for recycling, the city numbers show.

Provincially, the recovery rate for plastic film was just nine per cent in 2020 (the last year for which provincial stats are available), according to Stewardship Ontario, a recycling regulator. They were even worse for polystyrene (3.5 per cent) and plastic laminates (2.8 per cent).

“The proliferation of the lightweight, flexible plastics has become a huge problem,” said Lakhan, who wrote his thesis on the Ontario blue box. “Our existing infrastructure just simply cannot manage it.”

Like many jurisdictions, Ontario dealt with this problem for years in part by pretending it didn’t exist. Municipalities sold bundles of mixed and flexible plastics to brokers, at cut rate prices, and the brokers, in many cases, shipped them overseas, mostly to China. In Ontario, a bundle sold to a broker counts as having been “sent for recycling” regardless of what happens to it on the other side. That allowed the province to claim for years that a significant portion of its flexible plastics were getting recycled, even if, in reality, much of it was getting discarded or burned.

But in 2018, China largely stopped accepting imports of scrap plastic. No other end markets of comparable size have cropped up. And Ontario, like other Canadian jurisdictions, has been stuck with a glut of the hardest to recycle plastics ever since.

There are some who see this as a come-to-Jesus moment for the plastics industry. “In our enthusiasm around the blue box, we really have helped promote this idea that recycling is a solution for plastics. And it really is not for single-use plastics,” said Wirsig. In her view, most consumer plastics have never been and never will be recyclable at the scale we currently use them. Only with a raft of new policies aimed at cutting plastic use, simplifying plastic packaging and eliminating hard-to-recycle plastic types (or “resins” as they’re known in the industry) will we curb our plastic waste problem.

“We pretended we were recycling plastics all these years when really we were just shipping them off to China (which) probably burned or buried most of the flexible plastics,” she said.

In theory, Ontario’s new curbside recycling regime should help with some of those problems. Under the old system, every municipality was responsible for running its own blue box program and paying half the costs. The other half came from what are known as “product stewards,” the manufacturers, retailers, franchise holders and other companies that introduce packaged products into the marketplace.

Under the new system, which is set to come into force in Toronto next summer before spreading across the province, the stewards are responsible for setting up a new, province-wide system, and paying for the entire thing. It’s a principle called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and it’s meant to leverage both scale and market incentives to drive better recycling outcomes.

“Right now we have a loosely organized, fragmented system,” said Allen Langdon, CEO of Circular Materials, one of the organizations working to set up the new EPR system on behalf of producers. “Being able to standardize the system across the province will just lead to efficiencies,” he said. It will mean every household in Ontario will be dealing with the same blue box rules and every facility will be processing the same materials. That, in turn, should allow for consolidation and innovation at the next step up the chain, in what are known as Materials Recovery Facilities, or MRFs (pronounced to rhyme with “Smurfs”).

MRFs are where recyclable materials get separated, cleaned and bundled for sale. Bigger, more advanced MRFs should, in theory, be able to process more plastics faster, at a lower cost and with far less wastage than existing facilities.

“There’s no scale around recycling in Ontario now, or Quebec or any other province except for B.C. (which moved to a full EPR system in 2014),” said Elena Mantagaris, vice-president of plastics at the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada. “What we have now is a post-use management issue, because we’ve not invested in the infrastructure and technologies to effectively manage that. … EPR will be a game changer.”

But not everyone buys that argument. Lakhan, for one, sees the new system as an expensive and mostly ineffective tool for improving the environment. “Policy-makers have a propensity to try to legislate or regulate their way to sustainable outcomes. And that’s never been effective,” he said. Ontario has had some elements of extended producer responsibility for 20 years. Lakhan doesn’t think the results of that program justify a move to full EPR.

“One thing I always want to stress to people is that there is an overwhelming amount of data from the Ontario experience and B.C. to demonstrate a couple of things: one, EPR is not really working as intended and (two) that recycling costs are continuing to grow at an exponential rate.”

The existing recycling system in Ontario has multiple points of failure when it comes to plastics, Lakhan believes. EPR can help with some of them, but it won’t change what he sees as the fundamental calculus. Virgin plastics are incredibly cheap to produce. (Although, thanks to spiking oil prices, they are considerably more expensive now than they were a year ago). They are also versatile, lightweight and malleable, which is why so many manufacturers love them.

Collecting and recycling used flexible plastics, on the other hand, separating them into their difference resins (some of which have been laminated together to make things like standup plastic pouches), cleaning them, drying them and, in most cases, chipping them down into pellets, is labour intensive and expensive. Even then, most recycled flexible plastic can’t compete with virgin on quality. Instead of being reused for its original purpose it tends to get what those in the industry call “downcycled” or turned into something like a black garbage bag or a plastic lawn chair that will eventually, at the end of its life cycle, end up in a dump.

“We spend a lot of money behind a bad idea, but it still doesn’t fundamentally change the fact that this is a low-grade material,” Lakhan said. “To recycle plastic laminate product is $2,700 a tonne. And by comparison, newsprint is about $80 a tonne.” And there just isn’t much of a market for low-grade plastic pellets at that price.

Again, that’s not true for all plastics. Resins like PET (used in disposable water bottles for example) and HDPE (commonly used for laundry detergent and dish soap containers) are valuable and generally recyclable. “The market wants as much of (those) as we can get,” Lakhan said. “But for all those other crappy plastics, like the lightweight, multi-resin composites, (the market) is very limited.”

Lakhan is something of a contrarian in the environmental world, at least on the new EPR recycling system. But he isn’t alone in questioning how powerful an instrument it can be. One of the main selling points of EPR is that it uses market incentives to try to reduce and improve packaging. If producers are responsible for paying what it costs to recycle their own plastics, the theory goes, they’re going to use fewer plastics overall and more of the resins and formats that are easier to recycle when they do.

But Muir believes that’s mostly bunk. “There’s nothing here that’s going to cause a marketing guy at a head office of Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati to think we’ve got to make changes to our packaging. Nothing,” Muir said. “In 20 years of study I’ve never seen an example where EPR improves or reduces packaging.”

Lakhan agrees. “There is no absolute evidence to show that packaging producers are either switching into more recyclable packaging or, alternatively, developing new technologies to help them recycle their packaging,” Lakhan said. “All (EPR) is doing is adding costs to a system that are ultimately downloaded onto the consumer. So it’s you and I that are paying for these horrible packaging choices.”

But even EPR proponents don’t think the new system can do everything on its own. What EPR does, if it has strong, mandated recycling rates, is create a robust supply of recovered plastics. What it doesn’t touch is demand. That’s where advocates are hoping the federal government comes in.

Right now, it is usually cheaper (though significantly more carbon intensive) to use virgin plastic in most products than it is to incorporate recycled resins. For EPR to really work, that has to change. The easiest way to do that, advocates believe, is for the federal government to mandate minimum recycled content quotas in a host of plastic products. “What that does is flip the economics on its head,” said Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Circular Innovation Council (previously known as the Recycling Council of Ontario). “It starts to make the blue box materials quite coveted and pushes up their value.”

That’s something the Trudeau government has promised to do. But for now, that’s all it is, a promise. The government’s main priority on plastics right now is finalizing a regulation banning certain single-use plastics, including straws, checkout bags, Styrofoam takeout containers, six-pack ring carriers and stir sticks, by the end of this year. “We can’t ban our way out of this. And our entire strategy doesn’t hinge on this. But it is one important element of our strategy,” Guilbeault said. “And it will be the first one to get out the door. But there are other elements that we will be unveiling in the coming months and years.”

In his interview with the Star, Guilbeault reiterated that an aggressive recycled content quota system will be one of those elements. “We’ve already said that we want to ensure that we get to recycled content in packaging of at least 50 per cent by 2030,” he said. “We will do that through regulations. It will not be a voluntary program. … And it’s at least 50 per cent. So it could be more. Fifty per cent is not a ceiling. It’s a floor.”

Guilbeault wouldn’t say exactly when he plans to bring those rules forward. And in a minority Parliament, with inflation already pushing costs up for consumers, implementing a policy that could cause another spike in prices might be easier imagined than done. Still, when asked if the government is committed to implementing recycled content regulations before the next election, Guilbeault answered with an unqualified yes.

“As a responsible government, we have to be mindful of what is happening in the world, and inflation is certainly an element that we’re very seized with. But that doesn’t mean we should lose sight of other crises that are both immediate and longer term,” he said. “When the inflation debate is over, and inflation has come down in Canada and around the world, when the war in Ukraine has subsided, the crisis of plastic pollution will still be with us. … So we have to learn to walk and chew gum and who knows maybe even text at the same time. … And that’s what we’re doing.”

There are those in the environmental world who believe that even with an EPR system and federal recycled content quotas our plastics problem is only going to continue to grow. Plastics are too cheap, too versatile and too ubiquitous, and the plastics industry too powerful, to be driven out with carrots and sticks, they argue. What we need is a hammer, in the form of extended product and resins bans, legislated design rules, and stricter policies aimed at driving the total amount of plastic in our system way down.

There are others, meanwhile, mostly in industry, but some environmentalists, too, who think that plastics aren’t nearly as bad as they’ve been made out to be. “You have to look at the whole picture,” said Mantagaris. “Everything about plastic is advantageous until we get to post-use management of it. And what we’re saying is, that’s been a neglected area. It’s not that it’s not solvable. It’s been a neglected area, since the inception of the recycling system. So let’s focus on putting in place the system (and) the technology that we need to manage it effectively.”

Regardless, what almost everyone who spoke to the Star for this story agreed upon is that the biggest risks going forward are political. There is no one thing that will solve the plastic waste problem. But taken together, these measures should help, if there’s enough political will and competence to make it happen.

Provincially, success may well hinge on the strength and political independence of the regulator put in charge of overseeing and auditing the system. A tough regulator given progressive and escalating targets, and the tools to verify and enforce them, could drive real change in Ontario. A weak one would likely mean more greenwashing and the status quo.

Federally, nothing is guaranteed. The recycled content quotas could be derailed by lobbying, or they could die the quiet death of an early election. Even the single-use plastics bans could still come under sustained attack and be pulled in favour of something less controversial. But if nothing else, Guilbeault, a former Greenpeace activist, seems personally committed to the file.

“I know people are eager and impatient to see everything being deployed, and I am too,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s difficult to come up with one piece of regulation or legislation that has everything under the sun that we would like to do or that we’ve committed to do. We want to get there, for sure.”

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