Colby Cosh: British Columbia’s trash-recycling paradox

Photo by NICK PROCAYLO/PNG

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On Monday morning CBC News published an interesting story about some local trouble spots that are emerging in British Columbia’s highly advanced, if not world-leading, system for trash recycling. Recycling makes a fun target for conservatives who occasionally want to bash a few hippies, and for a pretty good reason: the value of a recycling effort is only ever as good as the accounting behind it is complete. There are some things it makes sense to throw out after one or a few uses, and some things it makes obvious sense to recycle, and there is no such thing as a per se right to pollute. But there are always environmental costs to reclaiming recycled goods, and these could swallow up the gains and then some if they’re not factored in.

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B.C. has established a whole command-and-control system for trash recycling, a system that requires buy-in from the general public without much help from transparent consumer-level incentives like bottle deposits, and that system is fraying a bit in certain parts of the province. Recycle B.C., the non-profit agency that operates the system, has a threshold for “contamination” of recycling bins because of mis-sorted materials: it wants 95 per cent of recycling-bin loads to be suitable for recycling, a figure of which Nanaimo and Richmond are now falling short.

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Contaminated loads have to be sent directly to the landfill, and the Recycle B.C. threshold was actually lowered from 97 per cent a few years ago while the expectations for consumer sorting continue to become more detailed and stringent. B.C. residents now need an entire digital reference book to determine what they can throw out, where and how.

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There is an incentive system in place to prevent this sort of thing, but it’s applied by Recycle B.C. to the municipalities themselves, and the agency has the power to issue large fines to towns and cities if individuals aren’t doing a good job of sorting and in some cases rinsing their trash. In the delinquent areas this will now necessitate teams of recycle-bin auditors who check individual bins, put warning stickers on offending ones and eventually start denying collection services to the pathological scofflaws.

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The next step in this dance is pretty obvious: no doubt some of those people who don’t want to be punished for inadequate sorting will simply throw everything, including the “best” recyclables, into the un-audited bins that go directly to the landfill. The umbrella agency may then see its top-level numbers for materials recovery decline, and may be forced to audit the landfill garbage throughout the province more closely …

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Again, there’s no such thing as a right to pollute: I don’t want to make a critique of the idea of recycling, but I will observe that this situation exhibits a particular communitarian, left-wing type of problem of social control and incentive design. There’s a lot of dependence on goodwill here, on everybody accepting that B.C.’s system is a good and honourable thing to which they’ll contribute a certain amount of voluntary effort, but the means of enforcement have obvious loopholes and could result in tragedy-of-the-commons effects … or just more ascending, possibly wasteful policing effort.

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Meanwhile, new people are coming into B.C. all the time, from less environmentally sensitive parts of Canada and from around the world, and it may take time — generational time? — for them to adopt B.C.-style eco-consciousness or even B.C.-style ideas of personal responsibility and order. What’s a province to do — build a wall out of recycled Coke bottles?

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