The organization behind the BC recycling system wants residents to make more to prevent plastics from going to landfills or ending as garbage, since only 45 percent of the plastic packaging used by residents recover to recycle.
“There has been a lot of hesitation around recycling, but our model shows that a system that manages and recycling these plastics can have and recycled,” said Sam Baker, executive director of Recycle BC
Baker says that if residents put the plastic packaging in the right place, it will remain outside the landfills and, ultimately, it will become new products.
“If residents are going to do the job to put that material in the container or take to the tank, we will do our work to make sure it recycles.”
In 2024, residents were put in their blue boxes or brought to deposits 31,362 tons of plastic containers, from Ziploc bags to yogurt containers, of which 98 percent was recycled, according to the latest annual recycling BC report.
The non profit system of BC, introduced 10 years ago, was the first in North America to demand producers to pay the packaging and the role they create to recycle, raising the load of local governments.
Its success is measured, in part, subtracting the net tons collected from the tons informed by the producers, which is the recovery rate.
In 2024, BC recycling recovered 100 percent of glass made by producers and used by residents, and 92 percent paper.
However, the recovery of plastics does not reach much, combined, less than half of the rigid and flexible plastics used by residents end up being diverted and recycled, which means that the rest goes in the trash.
The recovery of plastic bags and wrapping paths far behind the recovery of things such as plastic containers.
Baker said there are several reasons for this, that they go from the lack of understanding how the BC system works and the possible distrust of it, to the confusion about how to classify the elements and, ultimately, the need to bring some articles to special deposits.
“There are those who have that apathy and do not know what happens, or are poorly informed about what happens, with their material once it enters the blue container,” Baker said. “And those are the stories, the dynamics we are trying to change.”
Recycle the objective of BC is to increase the recovery rate of all plastics to at least 50 percent. A way of obtaining profits will be to improve the recovery of flexible plastics, such as bags and wrappers.
Currently, most residents need to collect and maintain those articles and then take them to one of the 227 deposits spread in the province or one of the 53 drug places in London, which has recycling kiosks for articles not accepted on the sidewalk or the collection of multiple units buildings.
“London Drugs acknowledges that we put a lot of material in the market,” said Raman Johal, sustainability manager of the retail chain. “So we only feel good that we are responsible for recovering part of that material.”
But corporate responsibility only works if residents are willing to make the effort to bring materials.
Recycle BC has a plan to overcome that barrier. In January, it launched a pink box, to be used in communities along with the blue boxes of the residents.
Currently, only West Vancouver and Maple Ridge offer the service, with at least two largest municipalities online next year, according to Baker.
Aubrey Smethurst, a West Vancouver resident who works in marketing, describes the pink box as a “game change.”
The mother of two children says that for a long time she has worried about recycling and that she would do everything possible to make sure things like the plastic bags that her family used reached the deposits.
Now he diverts them to his pink box, which is collected once a month from his house.
“One of the things that has really shown me is the amount of plastics that we really use in our daily lives,” he said.
Smethurst said that seeing flexible plastics accumulate in its pink box has changed its purchase habits, which means that it looks for items with less plastic packaging and finds ways to reuse something of them.
