McMaster and other large clients of Waste Connections informed that ‘mixed recyclables’ are doomed for landfill

Garbage hit a breakthrough at McMaster University when 916 metric tonnes of trash was sent to the landfill in 2018 — the first year in a five-year auditing trail that the Hamilton institution recycled and composted more waste than it dumped.   Despite the milestone, McMaster's 2018 waste diversion rate of 54 per cent was still short of the provincial objective of diverting 60 per cent of waste from the landfill.   The feat is attainable. Mohawk accomplished a 71 per cent diversion rate at its Stoney Creek campus and 65 per cent at its Fennell campus with a total of 283 metric tonnes sent to the landfill from both locations.   As McMaster stepped up efforts to improve its diversion score this year, unwelcome news arrived in June when its garbage contractor Waste Connections gave notice to the school and other large private clients in Hamilton that bins with mixed recycling materials would be sent to landfill because of more stringent requirements at the Asian plants that process plastic, paper and other materials.   "We're been told that there is no market for co-mingled recyclables — that's why we are now separating on campus to ensure they can be recycled," said Gord Arbeau, director of communications at McMaster.   The success of specific labelling and extra effort needed to separate recycled materials at the student's union food court, library and in residences will be proven out in the next waste audit at McMaster expected to be run this fall.   For the waste audit last November, trash was gathered from six areas of the campus over two days. Consultant Waste Reduction analyzed 574 kilograms of trash and determined that the McMaster Student Centre, Mills Library and Brandon Hall generate the most garbage among the sites that also included Hamilton Hall, the John Hodgins Engineering and Burke Science buildings.   Improvements over 2016 and 2017 in waste reduction were noted in the category of mixed containers — down to 10.8 per cent of the audited waste in 2018 from 15.8 per cent in 2016, but paper towels climbed slightly to 13.6 per cent.   In the category of non-recyclables, the percentage jumped to 33 per cent of the audited waste at Mac versus six per cent in 2016.   The term "non-recyclables" is not a dirty word to TerraCycle, part-owned by Waste Connections that handles McMaster's waste.   The company, founded by a Toronto entrepreneur, does a steady business recycling chip bags, candy wrappers and even cigarette butts, finding markets and products for these traditionally non-recyclable materials within the 20 countries in which it operates.   Its 350 employees and $40-million-a-year operation is funded by the major consumer brands and retailers who make and sell razor blades, infant car seats and packaging that goes with it. It's one of many offspring of the emerging circular economy that is turning attention to the corporate world as a financing source for solutions to problems it had a hand in creating.   While plastic and other materials overflow in ports across Asia in the aftermath of curtailed imports by Chinese recycling plants, TerraCycle has been largely unaffected, said Brett Stevens, the New Jersey-based company's global vice-president of material sales and procurement.   "I'm not relying on the same Chinese markets which used low-cost manually sorting of this this stuff to get it usable again."   Instead, Stevens seeks out product manufacturers "to not only get them to implement recycled product instead of the virgin content they're using, but to get them to think out of the box."   An example he cites is the use of cigarette butts as a substitute for wood fibre in the composite decking materials sold at large home improvement centres.   For the governments and institutions that have depended heavily on traditional recycling practices, he has little sympathy.   "China had warned all these countries for years that they had to clean up and improve the quality of their bales or they would be shut out," Stevens said.   "I think it was just a long-term game of chicken and that nobody thought China would ever actually do it."