Is ‘it’s your mess, you clean it up’ a viable recycling strategy?

In today’s Big Story Podcast, extended producer responsibility is a practice it means governments handing over the task of recycling packaging to the companies that produce the waste. It happens in some capacity in most of Canada, and now Ontario is turning all of its recycling over to this model.

Calvin Lakhan is the co-investigator of the “Waste Wiki” project at York University’s Faculty of Environment and Urban Change, a research project devoted to advancing understanding of waste management research and policy in Canada.

“For every one ton of blue box material that residents put in their bin, 30 per cent of it is thrown out as residue. So we’re not doing the greatest job of capturing the recyclables that we’re telling people to put in the recycling bin,” said Lakhan.

But can we really trust for-profit companies to take recycling seriously? Are we seeing the lower costs and packaging innovations that are supposed to be the upsides of using this strategy? When we say, “it’s your mess, you clean it up!” — what happens if they don’t?