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...
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. [ultimate_spacer height="20"] The...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
