Why Recycling Doesn’t Work

In mid-1980s Ontario, after years of arguments with the province, the soft-drink industry agreed to partially subsidize the blue box, which had been invented a few years earlier by a garbage collector in Kitchener, in exchange for being allowed to switch from refillable glass bottles to cheaper, disposable options. In the end, according to Saxe’s report, the blue box diverts only 8 percent of Ontario’s material from landfills. Saxe’s Beyond the Blue Box report was presented to Ontario’s legislature last fall, as the province was considering a sea change in its approach to garbage: a “circular economy” in which industry would be responsible for products’ post-consumer life and manufacturing would become a closed loop in which as much as possible is reused, in perpetuity, to create new products.

Source: thewalrus.ca