Toronto Pilot Project aims to Educate on How to Properly sort Garbage and Recycling

The City of Toronto has a huge problem when it comes to residents filling recycling bins with non-recyclable garbage. In many cases, studies have shown that this is in part because residents are simply not educated on what is and is not recycling. A new City pilot project looks to change that. 

The six-month pilot project will see inspections conducted on residential recycling bins with the purpose of identifying any unwanted materials. Through this new pilot project, when a worker finds contaminated items in recycling bins, the bins will be pulled from the curb and tagged. Residents will then have to remove the contaminated materials and re-submit their recycling bin on the next day.

Truth be told, contamination in recycling costs Toronto millions of dollars every year. Estimates by the City suggest that as much as 25 percent of what’s found in recycling bins are non-recyclable materials. To break it down even further, that means that of the 200,000 tons of recycling picked up every year in Toronto, roughly 50,000 tons of that is non-recyclable garbage. The items found in recycling bins that do not belong there include food contaminants, kitchen items such as frying pans, coffee cups, and old, used car parts.

A big motivation behind this six-month recycling pilot project in Toronto is cost. The financial commitment required to manually sort garbage from recycling is sizeable. The annual costs may be as high as $6 million for Toronto.

As the contamination is reduced, this cost begins to come down. The City is currently aiming for a contamination rate of 10 to 15 percent which is what it believes it can realistically achieve through this pilot project.

For those don’t know how to recycle properly or that have questions about what’s recyclable, this is definitely going to be a learning experience. By heading out on a Google search or browsing YouTube, there is already a lot of information available on recycling, and what is and is not recycling. The City hopes with its pilot project to take things a step further, speaking with residents directly and identifying problems in the recycling chain as they go along.

No matter how one looks at this pilot project, at the end of the six months, it is going to save the City money and it’s also going to help continue pushing Toronto towards a more environmentally friendly city.

There is much opportunity currently in Toronto to divert waste from its landfills and to increase recycling efforts. This project is a step in the right direction and something that is no doubt going to have a positive effect on the community as a whole.

There are discussions ongoing of the possibility of issuing tickets to residents who refuse to recycle. Currently, if any wrong items are found in recycling bins, there are no penalties. In the future however, that may see change.

As the pilot project wraps up in late spring 2018, it will be interesting to see its accomplishments and what the next step the City takes in decreasing its contamination recycling rate.