The Waste Free Ontario Act,…

The Waste Free Ontario Act, from the previous government, was drafted to recognize the need to recover valuable resources in all waste streams. The goal was to minimize waste sent to landfill. For this reason Energy-from-waste facilities were not considered to be part of the zero waste plan as these valuable resources were lost.

The Ford government dropped the Waste Free Ontario Act, bringing in the Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act in 2016. By burning blue box materials the current government is forcing producers to use virgin materials for packaging and printing. This in turn will increase costs of packaging which will be passed onto the consumer. The cost to the environment is much greater when we rely on virgin materials.

The province's Individual Producer Responsibility Plan has also reduced the number/types of materials that residents could put into their blue boxes. Hamilton used to accept e.g. books (hardcover removed), CD/DVD jewel cases in the blue boxes, and our three Community Recycling Centres also accepted bulky plastic waste such as garden furniture, children's play structures and large food pails. The focus of the blue box is now on packaging, when there are so may other materials that are also recyclable.

This whole recycling program has taken a huge step backwards when we actually need to move forward to zero waste and a circular economy. They seem to be ignoring the Circular Economy aspect of the Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act and the only resource they are recovering is a very small portion of the energy that was used to create the packaging in the first place!! Residents will now be less likely to put materials into their blue boxes if it means that the material is burned rather than recycled into new packaging. Once again this is a huge step backwards.