Flagstaff Waste Management recycling programs going through changes - blue bag program done for now

Co-mingled recycling, like the bin shown above, or blue bag recycling programs, are being phased out as consumers are encouraged to sort their waste at home and provide the highest possible quality of recyclables. The cost to property sort co-mingled recycling is as much or more than the cost to put them in the landfill.

Recycling in Flagstaff County, and elsewhere in the country, is undergoing some real changes due to the near-loss of the world’s major plastic recycler, China.

At the start of the year, China changed the terms under which they would accept plastic recyclables, going from an allowed contamination rate of five percent, to less than one-half of one percent.

Murray Hampshire is the Manager at Flagstaff Waste Management.

He attended an Alberta Recycling Conference with over 300 key personnel from facilities across the province.

“This is real. Life’s changing, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like.”

Hampshire says that the recycling industry has been taking everything, in every form up until now, but now more than ever before, not all recyclables are marketable.

He says now the challenge is to sort the good recyclables from the “bad,” in the co-mingled program, but says it is $95 per tonne to sort, which is the same, or a little more, than it costs to dump into the landfill.

Hampshire says pre-sorting recycling results in a much higher quality recycled material, because it’s all sorted apart at the start.

“But that’s not as attractive to the public as just co-mingling all recyclables together.”

He says when the public has to sort, the amount of waste being recycled goes down.

“But we need to get used to sorting, and we at Flagstaff Waste need to choose what we will recycle.”

Hampshire says that a business plan has been presented to Councils of all the member municipalities on what Flagstaff Waste’s recycling program might look in the near future.

For now, the curbside blue bag recycling pilots in Sedgewick and Killam are finished.

Communities still have the yellow co-mingled bins, and will keep these until new bins come in under the proposed new program, with the details of what will be accepted being released over the next few weeks.

Recycling is in crisis mode worldwide, as countries try to deal with mounting stockpiles of plastic.