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No place for plastic fruit baskets in blue boxes

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In Simcoe County
Oct 21st, 2010
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New containers too difficult to recycle, says county
By Nicole Million Barrie Advance October 19 2010
MIDLAND – After the community spent years fighting the development of a landfill in Tiny Township, one local woman is hoping residents will show as much passion for banishing a new kind of packaging for fruits.
Midland resident Frances Pitkanen is concerned about the introduction by many grocery stores of two- and three-litre plastic baskets.
“The recycle truck is refusing to take them, and so they must go into the garbage along with the rigid plastic containers from cookies, cakes, pies, muffins and many fruits,” she said in a letter to The Mirror. “At a time when we are supposed to be working toward zero waste, we are seeing more and more plastic come into our homes and then into the county dump.”
Wendy Madden, manager of Loblaw Superstore in Midland, said there has yet to be a big outcry from customers.
“The (one) customer that did call, I told them to call the customer service line to voice concerns,” she said, noting the decision to implement such packaging is not done at the store level.
Steve Maurice, owner of Valu-Mart in downtown Midland, said although he has not personally received a complaint regarding the plastic packaging, he has heard from other stores in the county that the inability to recycle the containers is a concern.
“Some communities will definitely recycle those containers, and the hope is eventually all communities will,” he said, noting the reason this type of packaging was developed is because it protects the product better. “The old style is open to air and the products loses all its moisture…. The plastic container allows the product to breathe, but keeps the moisture inside.”
Maurice said although this summer may have seen the introduction of plastic packaging for peaches, the industry has been moving toward this for a while.
“We’ve been seeing it with plums for many years,” he said. “The hope is that there’s no reason that plastic can’t be recycled. We just don’t do it in Simcoe County.”
Rob McCullough, director of environmental services for the county, said there are a number of reasons the new plastic fruit baskets and the lighter, flimsier clamshell containers – the clear plastic packages often used for baked goods and produce – are not currently accepted in the recycling program.
“There currently are no stable markets for this material within a reasonable travel distance,” he said via email. “From time to time, mixed plastics recycling facilities do start up around North America promising to take many material types, only to run into financial troubles or require a perfectly clean resource only achievable through industrial-type diversion programs rather than post-consumer feedstocks.”
Another reason, he noted, is that clamshell packaging can be made from a variety of plastic resins, each of which has to be sorted into like products at a recycling sorting facility.
Sorting by hand, however, is labour intensive and fraught with error, making contamination of the sorted product unavoidable, he indicated. Automated sorting processes are similarly unreliable, he said.
McCullough noted clamshell containers are either considered a contaminant and discarded at sorting facilities, or are included in a mixed-plastics stream.
“Since the county does not operate our own sorting facility, and therefore relies on outside facilities for this processing, we cannot be confident on how each of the processing facilities manages these materials,” he said. “We don’t want to collect a waste in our recycling materials, only to have it discarded at a recycling sorting facility as being a contaminant.”
Nonetheless, Pitkanen said she hopes residents will fight to eventually have the plastic packaging included in the county’s waste-management strategy.
“There must be some way we can push back against this,” she said. “We rallied to put an end to Site 41. We have learned to compost and have turned our backs on plastic bags. Perhaps we can now take a stand against rigid plastic packaging.”
McCullough said clamshell packaging is being used more and more, but still only constitutes less than one half of one per cent of the waste placed out for collection by residences in Simcoe County.
“It is our preference to concentrate on increasing capture rates for materials which are easily recyclable and are already included in the county’s recycling program,” he said.

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