The fall is a busy time in our industry for events and seminars. Here is a brief listing of some of the more important ones between now and the end of the year in Ontario. Mark your calendar, and visit the following websites for more details:

www.owma.org
www.amrc.ca
www.swanaon.org
www.rco.on.ca
www.stewardshipontario.ca
www.mwin.org
www.yearinreview.ca

EVENTS

September 29
AMRC Best Practices Consultation Session
Four Points by Sheraton, London
www.amrc.ca

October 4
OWMA/AMRC Co-operative Contract Design Workshop
Topics include: Managing Escalation Costs, Put-or-Pay Clauses, How to account for Flexibility
(Special session on LCBO deposits just added! BC's AL Lynch to speak about the BC blue box experience, where virtually no drinks containers are collected.)
Airport Marriott Hotel, Toronto
Contact Michele Goulding 905-791-9500
www.owma.org
www.amrc.ca

October 23 - 27
SWANA/OWMA Landfill Symposium and SWANA Training Courses
SWANA Training courses: October 23, 24, 25 (Manager of Landfill Operations [MOLO] -- 3-day course, Manager of Bioreactor Landfill Operations -- 2-day course, Managing Composting Operations -- 3-day course)
SWANA/OWMA Landfill Symposium: October 26-27
Four Points Sheraton, St. Catherines
href="http://www.swanaon.org">www.swanaon.org
www.owma.org

November 2
NOTE: This date was moved from Nov. 3 to not coincide with the RCO event below.
Ontario Recyclers Workshop
Networking Lunch: 12:00 to 12:45 pm
Workshop Presentations: 12:45 p.m to 4:30 pm (approximate)
Location: Novotel Toronto Center or online via webcast
Cost: Free of charge
Visit www.stewardshipontario.ca

November 3
Energy From Waste Forum
Is There a Role for Advanced Thermal Technologies in Effective Waste Management?
Sponsored by The Region of Peel
8:00 am - 4:30 pm
Holiday Inn Select
30 Peel Centre Drive
Recycling Council of Ontario
416-657-2797 x4
www.rco.on.ca

November 16
Year In Review Environment Conference 2006
Sutton Place Hotel, 955 Bay Street, Toronto
Visit www.yearinreview.ca

November 29 - December 30
2006 Canadian Waste & Recycling Expo
Contact Arnie Gess at 1-877-534-7285
href="http://www.swanaon.org">www.swanaon.org
www.owma.org
View seminar program at http://www.owma.org/db/db2file.asp?fileid=435

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Journalist David Menzies has written an amusing and slightly disturbing article about his experience writing about (and for) the Alberta Recycling Management Authority (ARMA) for Marketing magazine, where he's a regular columnist. Menizes wrote articles that were critical of ARMA for such publications as The Western Standard, and was later approached by ARMA to write something favorable on contract. The whole sorry saga suggests the organization needs to hire serious PR representation...fast! I've copied the article below.

MARKETING MAGAZINE

September 11, 2006

Don't try this at home

By DAVID MENZIES

A government agency tries offering a critical journalist lucrative freelance work. Call it damaged damage control

And now for something completely different: a tale of damage control gone horribly awry. By way of background, in addition to my "Consumer Guy" gig, I also toil as a freelance writer for several periodicals. As you can imagine, I'm constantly dealing with industry and government spin doctors. Their mandate is to influence people like me to serve their own interests. It's all part of the game. But something occurred recently that left me dumbfounded. It also left me praying that this was an isolated incident, and not the shape of things to come when an entity feels it necessary to creatively deal with "bad press."

I'll cut to the chase: last year I penned two magazine features for Canadian Business and Western Standard on an electronics recycling program in Alberta. The program is managed by a government agency called the Alberta Recycling Management Authority (ARMA). The gist of each article was that the ARMA program is a gremlin-laced lemon.

Indeed, ARMA's e-waste initiative has achieved the near-impossible by infuriating both the right and left wings of the political spectrum. The left is miffed because there's little evidence that Alberta's electronic waste is being properly diverted; as well, there are no incentives to entice brand owners to make their electronic products more environmentally friendly. Those on the right, meanwhile, label ARMA's "Advanced Disposal Fees" as just another egregious tax grab (an Albertan consumer, for example, must now pay an ADF of $45 when buying a big screen TV.)

Needless to say, I wrote a scathing indictment of the ARMA program. As is its right, ARMA responded with a letter to each editor, claiming I got it all wrong and that I had done ARMA a disservice. End of story.

Er, not quite. I later received a phone call from ARMA's communications manager, Kari Veno. And what she had to say left my jaw resting on the linoleum. Namely, ARMA wanted to get the message out on how great its e-waste program is. And I was the wordsmith to pen such a piece! Naturally, I'd be well-paid for such an assignment. And as a bonus, I'd get additional coin if I could somehow get the article published in various trade and consumer periodicals. (Never mind that a journalist would be hard-pressed to sell a story to any credible media outlet if the article was funded by a source, but I digress.) At this point, does any reader need to reference Coles Notes to figure out the unspoken strategy of ARMA? I didn't think so.

My first reaction was to try to talk myself out of the assignment. I told Veno I was likely "the last writer on earth" ARMA would want to hire given my previously published articles. Inexplicably, Veno remained convinced I was the write stuff essentially because I had already researched the program.

Faster than you could say "payola," I was on assignment for ARMA. But the hoped-for puff piece would soon emerge as a stillborn abomination. After re-researching the program and re-interviewing various sources (many of whom were provided by ARMA), I e-mailed my questions to ARMA's CEO Doug Wright to get ARMA's official response. Those questions zeroed-in on some very nitty-gritty details regarding ARMA's e-waste program, the sort of information, I reckon, ARMA doesn't want to make public. The result: I was informed that ARMA was "too busy" to take part in the project. By this point, the situation was perversely amusing: here was ARMA paying me to write a story on its terrific program but was declining to comment.

I recently linked up with Guy Crittenden, editor of Solid Waste & Recycling magazine (Crittenden is also a vocal critic of the ARMA e-waste program.) Disturbingly, he wasn't surprised to hear about my misadventure. That's because he was also casually approached by ARMA to pen some (presumably) happy-talk feature about the e-waste program. Being the editor of the leading industry trade magazine, Crittenden declined.

Closure came in mid-July when I took delivery of a "kill fee" from ARMA (my apologies to the taxpayers of Alberta). The cheque was accompanied by a one-page letter from Wright. His missive boiled down to this: ARMA believes in being transparent and accountable with the public and the media ... but just not at this particular time.

The bottom line is a media-savvy professional needs to deliver a message to ARMA. And the message is this: while prostitution is legal in Canada, alas, the act of communicating for the purpose of solicitation is not.

DAVID MENZIES is a Toronto writer. His "Consumer Guy" column appears every two weeks.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Colin Isaacs recently wrote an article for his environmental newsletter (The Gallon Report) panning the Province of Ontario's recent announcement that it's placing wine and alcohol beverage containers on deposit. I found Isaac's protets rather over the top. I was going to write my own critique, but then got hold of a rebuttal written by Todd Pepper, General Manager for the Essex-Windsor Solid Waste Authority.

I have reprinted both items below for readers' interest. You might wish to real the bottom entry by Colin Isaacs first, the Todd Peppers reply.

Dear Colin:

I have always respected your independent voice and environmental commitment, but I have to admit that you have lost me on your editorial where you recently commented that the LCBO deposit-refund program announced by Premier McGuinty would strangle the "world class recycling program" here in Ontario.

I thought that you would be the last person in the world that I would have to tell that blue box recycling programs and deposit-refund programs co-exist in almost every other Province in Canada, as well as many other jurisdictions in the world, that are much more effective and efficient at diverting paper and packaging waste from disposal than the stand-alone blue box program that exists in Ontario. How you can think that a 60% recovery rate of wine and spirit bottles in Ontario's blue box program is world class compared to the 91% recovery rate for wine and spirit bottles in British Columbia and Alberta, the 89% recovery rate for these bottles in Nova Scotia and the 86% recovery rate for these bottles in Saskatchewan is beyond me. If you want world class, come with me to the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka or Costa Rica where recycling programs that I have worked with in those countries go so far as to separate the Johnny Walker scotch bottle from the Napoleon brandy bottle to take back to the distributor of that brand in that country so that the bottles can be re-used, instead of recycled, or, as you seem to support, using glass as an aggregate substitute.

If glass is not recycled, perhaps instead of mining the UNESCO World Heritage Niagara Escarpment for aggregate materials they instead will be mining the sand dunes of Pinery Provincial Park or wreaking havoc in a less developed country with lower environmental standards than Ontario or Canada to mine the natural resources required to make new glass bottles instead of recycling glass cullet from an efficient deposit-refund program here in Ontario into new glass bottles.

If you don't think it is true that glass is being landfilled, then I suggest you drive about 100 kilometres up Highway 6 from Fisherville and watch 100% of the glass that goes in the front door of a recycling centre come out the back door to be sent to the Green Lane Landfill for disposal. That is just one of many examples where glass collected in a blue box recycling program is landfilled every day in Ontario.

As an environmentalist with your track record, you should also know that the only environmental benefit of recycling glass has to do with the energy savings of making new glass bottles with glass cullet as opposed to making new glass bottles from mined natural resources. However, that energy savings is lost as soon as the glass has to be sent more than 80 kilometres to market. There are very few blue box recycling programs in Ontario that are within an 80 kilometre range of a glass manufacturer or glass recycling facility. Sending wine and liquor bottles destined for recycling back in the same truck as beer bottles destined for recycling can at least help narrow that energy gap. What would be even better would be if the truck that just delivered cases of wine and spirits to the local LCBO retail store was filled back up with empty wine and spirit bottles destined for recycling instead of that truck driving empty back to an LCBO distribution centre.

Finally I want to address the issue of cost. Ontario property taxpayers and stewards of Stewardship Ontario are spending millions of dollars a year to recycle a packaging material from a Crown Corporation that produced a profit of over $1 billion in 2005. The Province of Ontario also collected another $50 million in "environmental levies" on every bottle of wine and spirits manufactured in Ontario. Why you would think it appropriate that property taxpayers and the other stewards of Stewardship Ontario should subsidize the collection of a material in the blue box program that has $0 value is beyond me. If you don’t believe that coloured glass has a $0 value, then I refer you to the CSR price sheet at http://www.csr.org/pdf/pricesheet/08_2006ps.pdf so that you can see what glass is worth when recycled through the blue box program.

As you will see in that price sheet, revenue for the sale of coloured glass has been at $0 or a negative revenue (actually an additional cost associated with transportation) since 1996 when revenue for coloured glass first began to be tracked. The revenue for clear glass is not that much better. Since glass is the only material marketed from the blue box that is generally not sold F.O.B. the recycling centre the actual amount received is not the $36/tonne shown in the CSR price sheet, but $36 minus transportation or a net of approximately $15/tonne after municipalities have spent over $200/tonne to collect and process the glass in their blue box programs in the first place.

Respectfully yours,

Todd R. Pepper, General Manager
Essex-Windsor Solid Waste Authority


ONTARIO STRANGLES WORLD CLASS RECYCLING PROGRAM

By Colin Isaacs

Ontario's Blue Box recycling program is the world's most successful selective collection program, collecting more recyclable materials from more homes over a larger area, city, small town, and rural, than any other recycling program in the world. It was established by the Liberal government of Premier David Peterson. Now the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty seems to want to kill it.

Three years ago the McGuinty government implemented the Waste Diversion Act, an initiative developed by the Conservatives and guaranteed to ensure that the Blue Box program would be very limited in its ability to expand to include additional materials. Now the McGuinty government has announced that, effective next February, all wine and liquor containers will be put on deposit with consumers being asked to return them to beer stores. Ontario, once a bastion of policies which could be traced back to prohibition, has a quaint system where wine and beer are sold by government owned and operated liquor stores, as well as by an increasing number of winery-owned outlets, while beer is sold in stores owned by the breweries as well as in government liquor stores. Most beer cans and bottles carry a refundable deposit while liquor and wine bottles are recycled through the province-wide Blue Box recycling system.

McGuinty's plan to include liquor and wine containers in the deposit system with returns going to beer stores is a stake through the heart of the Blue Box system. While deposit-return and selective collection can, and have been shown to, co-exist amicably in some jurisdictions, this is always in a location where the selective collection is less successful than it is in Ontario. In Ontario, deposit-refund for liquor and wine containers will weaken the Blue Box system.

First it means that the province will pay for parallel systems for collection of recyclable glass, aluminum, and flexible beverage packaging. McGuinty has not, and is not likely to, put a deposit on all beverage containers. We are not suggesting that he should. But with a deposit on alcohol beverage containers, the people of the province will be paying for recycling of glass, aluminum, and flexible packaging twice, once through the Blue Box and once through the Beer Store. At least, this is inefficient. Jim Bradley, now Minister of Tourism but once the best Minister of the Environment Ontario has ever had and initiator of the province-wide Blue Box system, was quoted in 2002 in the Toronto weekly paper Eye as saying about LCBO deposits: "[It would occur] in the best of all possible worlds -- and you'd receive the accolades and applause of the green community on this -- [but] you have to know it will actually work. They deal with all kinds of different bottles, different shapes, different sizes, different-coloured bottles that it would be a virtual nightmare dealing with it that way." Pity Premier McGuinty didn't listen to this wisdom before jumping into bed with a private sector recycling system.

Second, the costs will be higher than anyone expects. Actually, higher than anyone except McGuinty expects. When asked what the cost of LCBO deposit-return system would be, McGuinty said he did not know. This is one of McGuinty's trademarks: to announce a policy, such as the shut-down of coal-fired power plants, without having the slightest idea how to do it or what it will cost. So it will be with LCBO deposits. Taxpayers will be hit with another tax: unredeemed deposits. The province will almost certainly pay The Beer Store to start up the program. Other brand owners using the Blue box system, including food and consumer product brand owners and retailers, will be hit with higher mandatory fees for their packaging to go into the Blue Box, and municipalities will face higher costs and lower revenues: the LCBO initiative will remove perhaps as much as 20% of the highly remunerative aluminum cans from the Blue Box stream; the $5 million a year that the LCBO has been putting into the Blue Box system may be lost; and the costs of managing the smaller amounts of glass containers still in the Blue Box system will increase. All of those increased costs will be passed on to one pocket, that of the hapless consumer and taxpayer

Third, the amount of glass actually recycled will likely decrease. One of the municipal concerns is that glass is a difficult material to handle in the Blue Box system. By removing some of the glass, it will become even more difficult to handle the remainder. Liquor and wine bottles are durable and easy to handle compared to other glass beverage bottles and such containers as pickle jars. With less glass in the system, many municipalities will take even less care to properly recycle glass containers.

The question of glass recycling is an interesting one. Some advocates have argued that much of the glass collected in the Blue Box system ends up in landfill. That is not exactly true. Contaminated loads occasionally end up in landfill because ceramics and stones can create dangerous conditions for workers if they find their way into glass furnaces. But many more contaminated loads are crushed and applied in such uses as road fill and asphalt surfacing. Some environmentalists have argued that this is not proper recycling. When building roads and parking lots we can either use crushed glass or we can use stone aggregate. Perhaps we should not be building more roads, but while we are doing so surely it is better to use crushed glass than to have to open more pits and quarries to provide the necessary aggregate material. One senior Liberal advisor who knows a lot about the Blue Box system has spent the last few years fighting a quarry in his neighbourhood along the UNESCO World Heritage Niagara Escarpment. A note to him: The deposit on LCBO containers makes it ever more likely that the province will allow more quarry applications, such as the one in your backyard in East Flamborough.

The Ontario government has bungled the waste management issue. Strangling the Blue Box is not any kind of solution to getting more waste out of landfill. Time is running out for real action if waste management, along with energy, are not to become a killer issue in the October 2007 provincial election.

Colin Isaacs, Editor
Gallon Report

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CSR:Corporations Supporting Recycling has recently issued two news releases expressing opposition to, and concern about, the Province of Ontario's decision to place LCBO wine and liquor containers on deposit, starting in the New Year. CSR says that the deposit system will harm the blue box curbside recycling programs and investment in glass recycling infrastructure. The CSR's point of view differs from that of various other organizations, including those that represent the interests of municipalities (Association of Municipaities of Ontario, or "AMO") and also the province's recycling coordinators (Association of Municipal Recycling Coordinators, or "AMRC") who administer the blue box progam. AMO and AMRC, as well as other entities like the Recycling Council of Ontario (RCO) and the Municipal Waste Integration Network (MWIN) have published formal position papers supporting the idea of placing LCBO containers on deposit. I've reproduced the CSR news releases below (click on the green link) so that readers may view them.

Attention News Editors:

Provincial plan to take LCBO glass out of blue box jeopardizes new glass processing capacity, industry recycling representative says

TORONTO, Sept. 9 /CNW/ - The Provincial Government's proposal to take LCBO wine and spirit bottles out of the municipal "blue box" program and put them on deposit, is jeopardizing a major municipal-industry joint venture that was about to create new glass processing capacity for up to 80,000 tonnes of glass collected in municipal recycling programs in and around the GTA.

An industry organization, CSR, that extensively monitors the operations of the municipal residential blue box system, said today the joint venture, which has been in the works for two years will be lost given the uncertainty created by this sudden announcement and because municipalities will not now be able to commit to providing the amount of glass that is needed.

In the joint venture, Unical of Montreal was about to sign a contract to secure land in the GTA to build the glass processing facility when the government made its announcement. When fully operational in 2007, it was expected to take more than 50,000 tonnes of glass from municipal blue box programs in southern Ontario to create high value construction products and to provide much needed competition in the glass recycling market. Unical has been advised not to proceed with its investment because of the potential negative impact of the government's plan on blue box glass.

The municipal partners involved in this arrangement -- Toronto, Durham, York, Peel as well as Hamilton and Guelph -- all had agreements from their councils to proceed and to commit glass recovered through their blue box programs.

"The benefits of this new facility would be an alternative market for glass food and beverage jars and bottles coming out of the blue box and greater market competition," said CSR's President, Damian Bassett.

A second venture with a company called Poraver of Barrie is creating a new, high value, annual market for an additional 30,000 tonnes of blue box glass from Ontario municipalities. It is building an innovative new facility to manufacture light weight, industrial ceiling tiles with glass from the blue box system.

Bassett noted that securing additional stable, higher value markets for municipalities for their blue box glass would lead to reduced municipal program costs. These investments are now in question.

For further information: Damian Bassett, President & CEO, CSR, Office: (416) 594-3457, Outside Office Hours: (905) 479-7480; Barbara McConnell, Communications, CSR, Office: (647) 777-3362, Outside Office Hours: (613) 471-1816

Attention News Editors:

Blue Box glass is recycled, not landfilled, recycling organization says

TORONTO, Sept. 9 /CNW/ - Recent claims published in the media that glass bottles and jars collected in Ontario's blue box recycling program are landfilled are ridiculous, says an industry organization that extensively monitors blue box recycling operations.

The incorrect statements are being made in connection with the provincial government's proposal to put LCBO wine and spirit bottles on deposit. "To suggest that the glass bottles and jars people faithfully put in their blue boxes to be recycled go to landfill instead is categorically untrue," said Damian Bassett, president of CSR. For the past 20 years CSR has helped municipalities to develop the highly successful and popular blue box recycling program in Ontario.

"In Ontario in 2005, municipalities marketed 861,000 tonnes of all recyclables, 128,000 tonnes of which were glass bottles and jars. A very, very small percentage-between 5% and 7% of what was collected, only some of it glass, was not marketed because of material losses during processing," he said. These numbers are independently verified through Waste Diversion Ontario, the organization established by the Province of Ontario to develop waste diversion programs.

"Let's be clear about this so every household knows that the effort they are putting into recycling is paying off -- all of the glass you put into your blue box gets recycled except for a small amount that is lost during the sorting process. And even then, efforts are underway to look for opportunities to put this material to alternative uses as well," he said.

Bassett also noted that every year in the last decade the amount of glass people have been recycling has increased between 4% and 5%, which is higher than the population growth of the province. The system is getting better every year.

"To suggest that our popular and convenient blue box recycling system is somehow a failure ignores the facts," Bassett said. "Because it collects a wide range of materials beyond simply beverage containers, it is a very effective and cost efficient method of recovering recyclable materials. Last year, we captured 58% of the recyclables across the province, which is very close to the provincial target of 60%.

Bassett said his organization is very worried about the possibility that the province will impose deposit return on LCBO and possibly other beverage containers.

He noted that a recent City of Toronto study (City of Toronto Works Committee Report, March 6, 2006) supported the blue box by reporting that "waste audits of a random sample of single-family homes in the City indicate that the recovery rate for beverage containers in the City's curbside recycling program is comparable to the recovery rate in deposit return jurisdictions. Based on the waste audits, the recovery rate for the beverage containers in the City's curbside Blue Box program is 88% for PET plastic beverage bottles, 77% for HDPE plastic beverage bottles, 82% for aluminum cans and 97% for LCBO glass containers."

Bassett said: "It is ridiculous to now ask the citizens of this province to stop putting their wine and spirit bottles into the blue box and instead to drive them to the nearest beer store while trucks continue to collect newspapers, magazines, metal cans, plastic bottles and glass jars from their homes every week. Why would we saddle the consumers of wine and spirits with tens of millions of dollars of additional costs each year to run a parallel system operated by a private corporation?"

For further information: Damian Bassett, President & CEO, CSR, Office: (416) 594-3457, Outside Office Hours: (905) 479-7480; Barbara McConnell, Communications, CSR, Office: (647) 777-3362, Outside Office Hours: (613) 471-1816

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)