SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Pop cans shipped down south and turned into aluminum foil; beer bottles washed and redistributed to brewers; plastic bottles shredded into flakes to make plastic bags; and Tetra Paks squished into bales and turned into cardboard boxes.

Adam and Donna Pich, who own The Bottle Shop-Recycling Depot on Old Airport Road, celebrated the depot's five-year anniversary Monday. Ninety-five per cent of beverage containers that make their way through the depot are recycled. - Nicole Veerman/NNSL photo

These are some of the things that happen to the beverage containers residents return to the recycling depot for a deposit.

Adam Pich, owner of The Bottle Shop-Recycling Depot, said 95 per cent of the beverage containers returned to his depot are recycled.

The remaining five per cent is comprised of glass liquor and wine bottles that are crushed and sent to the landfill, he said.

The Bottle Shop and the NWT Beverage Container Program celebrated their five year anniversaries last week.

Since the program's inception, 125 million beverage containers have been returned for recycling in the NWT.

More than half of those recycled containers made their way through Yellowknife's Bottle Shop.

Pich said residents deliver 1.2 million containers a month to the depot, totalling about 72 million containers over the last five years.

Bottles are shipped down south to various recycling companies because there are no recycling facilities for beverage containers in the NWT, said Judy McLinton, the manager of public affairs and communication at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

To cut down on the environmental impact of transporting the containers, they are condensed into bales and trucked in vehicles that would otherwise be travelling empty, she said.

The Bottle Shop sends 32,000 beer bottles to Edmonton each week to be recycled by Brewers Distributors Ltd., where they are washed and returned to brewers for reuse.

Bryan Pearce, manager of empty container returns for Brewer's Distributors, said the company tries to cut down on their carbon footprint by maximizing the number of bottles that fit in a trailer.

He also pointed out that the glass bottles being recycled are reused an average of 15 times.

About every three months, a truck filled with 40 bales of plastic beverage containers is sent from Yellowknife to Merlin Plastics in either Calgary or Vancouver, where they make HDPE pellets ­ used to make plastic bags ­ and PET flakes ­ used to make new plastic bottles, said Pich.

Aluminum cans are sent to Arkansas to be turned into aluminum foil, while Tetra Paks are sent to Edmonton to be recycled by the Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation.

Trucks full of baled cardboard are sent to Edmonton to Cascades Recovery, formally known as Metro Waste Paper Recovery.

Patrice Clerc, Cascades supply and services manager, said the cardboard is turned into new boxes, brown tissue paper and box liners.

"We're trying to use as much as we can in North America to make new materials," he said.

The Bottle Shop is one of three processing centres in the territories, with the others in Inuvik and Hay River. Other communities have depots and send their bottles to the three processing centres, said Pich.

Yellowknife processes bottles from Behchoko, Gameti, Lutsel K'e, Fort Good Hope, Wekweeti and Whati.

Since the NWT Beverage Container Program began five years ago, more than $13 million have been returned to NWT residents in refundable deposits, according to a press release from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

"That money would otherwise be at the landfill," said Pich. "It's a good program."

The program was created under the Waste Reduction and Recovery Act to stop approximately 30 million beverage containers that ended up in the NWT landfills each year.