Last December (2020), Bluewater Recycling Association (BRA) broke new ground in Ontario residential recycling processing by installing six new Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)-enabled robotic arms in their Material Recovery Facility (MRF). The investment was driven by the need to reduce reliance on hard-to-retain manual sorters and deal with a material mix...
This week's blog post was originally published March 30, 2021 by Resource Recycling. Education campaigns may improve curbside recycling practices for residents who produce average or low amounts of contamination, but they may not impact the worst offenders, according to new research. The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) has released a...
Municipal recycling costs have continued to increase annually, due to the increasing complexity and light-weighting of the packaging supplied into the market. Sorting challenges and confusion amongst residents is growing as packaging becomes more complex and multi-layered. In turn, this contributes to higher contamination rates and higher net system costs. The CIF,...
In this second installment of the "Put a lid on it" mini-series, we continue to explore the initial findings of a litter, moisture and time-and-motion audit conducted in Durham Region in the fall of 2020. Part I focussed on litter, including the causes, composition and lids as a potential solution....
Transition to an Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR) framework, China Sword policies, and COVID-19 are all contributing to a challenging and uncertain environment for Ontario municipalities operating blue box programs. Despite this, municipalities continue to deliver services and maintain program performance. To help ensure continued efficiency and effectiveness of recycling systems...
Earlier in October, the Federal government released a discussion paper “A proposed integrated management approach to plastic products”, outlining a proposal to ban single-use plastics starting in 2021. How does the Federal government’s proposed management strategies for single-use packaging align with Ontario’s draft blue box regulation? To kick off Ontario’s 2020 Waste...
Faced with a new processing RFP, Dufferin County sought to understand the costs to manage increasing amounts of bagged recyclables, and whether it would be more cost-effective to debag at the curb or process bagged materials at the MRF. Dufferin provides single stream recycling collection in Blue Boxes, with the...
For the second year in a row, net costs of the Blue Box program rose dramatically. Since 2016, gross costs have increased relatively steadily, while revenues have plummeted from $112 M in 2017 to the lowest revenue on record of only $55 M in 2019. This dramatic decline in revenue...
Responding to the need to clean up their fibre commodities to meet the increasingly higher demands of the end markets, EWSWA decided to upgrade their fibre line by installing an optical sorter to remove “browns” (cardboard and boxboard), containers and other contamination from its newsprint bales (Sorted Residential Paper #56...
Waste audit data provides a detailed breakdown of what’s in each waste stream. For the Blue Box, it quantifies the weight of each material group, contamination rates, and cross-contamination. This information is particularly useful when setting payment terms and revenue sharing parameters for a new processing contract. The City and...
For this weeks blog, we're trying something new! Watch the video or scroll down for the full text. If you like this format, send your feedback to communications@thecif.ca. Contamination rates prompted Northumberland to act During Waste Management Master Planning in 2014, Northumberland County identified a need to shift from single stream bagged...
Reliable data from waste composition studies helps monitor performance and plan for the future, but gathering this information can be time-consuming and expensive. To remove the burden for individual programs, the CIF and Stewardship Ontario conducted and shared results of waste composition studies from municipalities throughout the province. Results are in The...
In 2019, the Township of Algonquin Highlands started testing the effectiveness and efficiency of using covers for 40-yard fibre recycling bins. The goal of the project was to assess whether a covered bin would improve the quality of materials and help avoid increases in processing costs. Notices from the MRF indicated...
Like many programs, Quinte Waste Solutions (QWS) is well aware that materials incorrectly placed in recycling increases costs and decreases overall material quality. Focusing on the Multi-Residential (MR) sector, in 2018 QWS developed a strategic promotion and education (P&E) campaign with the goal of decreasing black plastics and polycoat cups...
In Peel Region, gravity locks were installed on a few Front End Loading (FEL) bins at Multi Residential (MR) buildings where the buildings did not use chutes for recycling as a means to control contamination and improve material quality. Okay, so what do gravity locks have to do with contamination? Gravity locks...
