2022 SEES CARTON PERFORMANCE TRENDING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

BY ISABELLE FAUCHER

Every year, the Carton Council of Canada (CCC) publishes the national blended collection recycling rate for cartons. For 2022, this performance now stands at 57 percent – up from 55 percent in 2021. So what explains this increase?

The national increase is primarily attributable to the increased performance in Ontario. In this province, the recycling performance for printed paper and packaging (PPP) materials including cartons was, until recently, calculated annually by Stewardship Ontario (SO) through its fee schedule. In the 2022 fee schedule it released in October 2021, SO determined that the combined recycling rate of gable top and aseptic cartons was 40 percent. However, this was inconsistent with the results from waste audits conducted by SO/Continuous Improvement Fund (CIF) that estimate the capture rate of cartons in Ontario is just shy of 70 percent.

The relatively low carton performance in Ontario was attributable to the high proportion of paper laminants (namely hot drink cups and paper-based ice cream containers) in the polycoat bales of municipal programs audited by Stewardship Ontario between 2017 and 2019.

In 2021, CCC carried out its own polycoat composition studies of three large recycling programs that were not part of SO’s dataset. In doing so, we found that paper laminants were not as present in those programs as they were in the programs audited by SO. We found that polycoat bales from the programs we audited had, on average, 90 percent cartons and only 6 percent paper laminants compared to 75 percent cartons and 22 percent paper laminants for the programs audited by SO. We calculated the 2022 carton performance by incorporating these new findings, which resulted in a 4 percent increase of the carton recycling rate in Ontario and a 2 percent improvement in the national performance.

Carton performance is based on data shared by the various provincial and territorial organizations that operate recycling programs. Some jurisdictions report a recycling rate, while others report a collection rate. For this reason, we cannot report a uniform national recycling or collection rate.

The recycling rate refers to the tonnes of cartons sent for recycling (i.e., once they have been sorted and baled at a ma- terial recovery facility or redeemed through a deposit return system) divided by the tonnes of cartons supplied to market. In contrast, the collection rate refers to the tonnes of cartons col lected in the recycling stream and delivered to a MRF divided by the tonnes of cartons supplied to market.

CCC will continue to grow its dataset from Ontario programs and is planning four additional polycoat bale audits over the course of this year. We are also encouraged by the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority’s recently published num bers, which show a growth in the tonnes of polycoat marketed by Ontario municipalities from the previous year (7,685 in 2021 versus 7,210 in 2020).

We are also collaborating with the Continuous Improvement Fund and SO to carry out four-season curbside, multi-residen tial, and depot waste composition studies (fall 2022 to summer 2023). This will result in more granular information pertaining to seven additional carton sub-categories.

Our data gathering and performance measuring efforts are just one of the tactics we utilize in order to work toward our goal of 70 percent blended carton collection recycling by 2025. We’re hopeful that the imminent transitions toward full produc er responsibility of the country’s two largest Blue Box systems, Quebec and Ontario, will help further improve overall collec tion and recycling performance.

ISABELLE FAUCHER is the managing director of the Carton Council of Canada.