SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
When discussing recycling, the idea of 'local' is much more expansive than when talking about food or art.

Adam Pich is the co-owner and manager of the Bottle Shop-Recycling Depot in Yellowknife. The facility connects recyclable beverage containers with end-markets in Canada and the U.S., as well as a few Yellowknife ones. - Erin Steele/NNSL photo

Although it can be as local as within your home by turning tin cans into flowerpots, or within your city through businesses like Old Town Glassworks, local can also mean Canada, or through lack of other options, North America. In a growing number of circumstances, material that could remain North American-local is shipped overseas. A significant portion of what Yellowknifers place in the six different recycling stations around the city actually ends up on a ship to China, or Indonesia, or wherever the market makes it a sound business case.

So why should we recycle?

If you ask the city or the territorial government, the answer is almost always, 'to conserve space in the landfill,' which can become an expensive taxpayer burden.

But one cannot look at recycling as a lone entity. To talk about recycling is to talk about waste reduction – the former is just a piece of this pie.

While the reasons behind why people recycle vary, there are financial incentives in place both through the city and the GNWT. If you save your bottles and return them to the recycling depot, you get between 10 and 25 cents back per bottle. If you live in a house in Yellowknife and produce more than two garbage bags per week, you have to buy tags from the city for $1 for each excess bag or pay $10 to take a carload of trash to the landfill. Contrary to this though, are apartment dwellers who throw their garbage directly into trash bins with no incentives to recycle. According to Dennis Kefalas, the city's senior administrative officer, the city intends to ban cardboard by the end of the year.

Even though incentives to recycle may be lacking for apartment dwellings it isn't difficult, said Kefalas. Blue recycling bins are strategically placed throughout the city, especially near apartment buildings.

“It's quite convenient for people to recycle, even when they're in the apartment buildings. Hopefully when we ban cardboard we're hoping that having these bins located at the apartment buildings will make it that much easier (to recycle),” said Kefalas.

He added the city has looked into curbside service, but studies have shown that most Yellowknifers are already recycling.

“We did a waste audit where we actually had people picking through the garbage bags ... and separating the waste. We found that most people are recycling to some extent. Either everything or the majority of recyclables,” he said.

Worldwide markets

Cascades Recovery is the company responsible for dealing with much of the City of Yellowknife's recyclables. After you separate and place them in the receptacles at one of the six locations around the city, it is baled at the landfill and shipped south.

Most of the materials head first to Edmonton – to a plant that processes mostly paper -- then to Surrey, B.C. where the Cascades Recovery Material Management Group links it to North American and international markets.

Ken Rasmussen, market development manager with Cascades Recovery in Surrey, says about 35 to 40 per cent of recyclable material thrown into blue bins in Western Canada goes overseas, and almost all of mixed paper waste, which includes egg cartons, envelopes, cereal boxes and backs of battery cases.

“Just about every pound of mixed (paper) waste that we get from Alberta going west is going export. Ninety-some per cent of it. We have a few little markets for it, but very little,” he told Yellowknifer by phone.

One of those few markets happens to be a few kilometres from the Edmonton plant that initially receives Yellowknife's recyclables.

Metamorphosis

Through the recycling process, cardboard most often becomes cardboard again and newsprint usually newspaper, although it could also become insulation or fibre trays. If going to China or Indonesia, mixed paper can become egg trays, fruit trays or fibre separators for cases of wine. The Edmonton plant which takes some of Yellowknife's mixed waste, recycles it into roofing paper.

Tin cans become tin cans again. Most plastics are pelletized – put through a machine that resembles a meat grinder and is cut into small pellets – and is then shipped to manufacturers to make a variety of items.

The Bottle Shop Recycling Depot, located on Old Airport Road, gives people cash for drink containers, bales the products at the facility, then ships the bales directly to North American end markets. The depot sends tin cans to Kentucky -- home of the only aluminium smelting plant in North America; plastics from the bottle shop go to Merlin Plastics in Calgary; beer bottles go to Brewers Distributors Ltd. in Edmonton where domestic bottles get re-used up to 50 times; glass is crushed, put into 3,000-pound bags and shipped to Airdrie, Alta. to a facility that makes it into pink insulation. Cardboard collected at the bottle depot goes to Edmonton.

Although the depot -- which opened in 2005 through a GNWT mandate to reduce waste and litter -- is a business, not all recyclables are money-makers, said co-owner and manager Adam Pich.

“There are a few things that we don't get paid for but we keep it out of the landfill,” he told Yellowknifer during a tour of the facility. The depot loses money on glass, which it has to pay for, makes money on aluminium, plastics and domestic beer bottles, and breaks even on cardboard.

The depot has collected 213 million beverage containers since it opened, according to GNWT statistics.

Creative recycling

Among the piles of bales and pallets of bottles is a corner of the depot where Pich collects bottles for Old Town Glassworks – a long-time local business which uses local glass as its base product – as well as bottles for brewers and winemakers who purchase them for the cost of the deposit. About 300 bottles a week go to these places, says Pich.

According to Chris Vaughn, waste reduction program manager with Ecology North, at-home answers to recycling like this carry a lot of potential in Yellowknife.

“From what I've seen in Yellowknife there is this real experience of resourcefulness,” he told Yellowknifer.

“I find that Yellowknifers are probably the most creative people I've met in quite some time and I feel like that creativity and resourcefulness can easily be used to support the environment and recycling doesn't necessarily always have to mean putting your tin cans in the appropriate compartment of the recycling stations although I totally encourage that,” said Vaughn.

“It can mean finding different ways to use your tin can to hold items, it can mean making jewelry with certain recycled products. There are lots of ways we can keep it with us and still do our part in terms of diverting waste from the landfill.”

Behind Vaughn's sentiment is the GNWT, which is in the process of rolling out a program called the Waste Reduction and Recycling Initiative. It will provide funding to communities or groups that find innovate ways of locally recycling a variety of material.

“It's not just targeted at waste paper products (a now-inactive GNWT initiative), but other areas,” said Diep Duong, manager of waste reduction and management with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

“Whether communities want it to be tires or batteries or if they want electronics or essentially anything they think is a priority for their community. Every community would be different,” said Duong.

Through the waste-paper initiative, the City of Yellowknife used recycled paper for its composting projects.

“That was a really good example of using that product here and not having to ship it,” she said.

Reduction at the source

Composting, as well as recycling, make up two levels of the waste management hierarchy – on top of which is source-reduction (actually minimizing what is produced) and at the bottom is the landfill and incineration. Recycling, as well as composting, fall somewhere in the middle. In the first three years of Yellowknife's composting program, the city collected 650 tonnes of material. The City of Yellowknife allows on-site salvaging at the dump, where people can remove what they want from the landfill. The GNWT initiative to cut down on plastic bag usage by charging 25 cents for each bag has been a resounding success, reducing this type of waste by 77 per cent.

“On a yearly basis we're preventing about seven million fewer bags being used in the Northwest Territories because of the program,” said Duong.

Vaughn says it's important to look at the big picture and do what you can, when you can.

“As you continue doing these local actions whether it be separating your recyclables, composting, whatever it may be ... every person has a different set of realities. While some people may prioritize re-using their cans, some people may prioritize walking to work, and it all plays a part. You want to have people feel empowered even if it's a small thing they're doing,” said Vaughn.