Celebrating 30 Years Of Blue Box Recycling

By Doug Draper

It isn’t too many times that Canadians can look across the border at our more entrepreneurial American neighbours and say – ‘Look what we did! This is one of those times we best you folks on something.”

Image courtesy of Niagara Region

One of those times was of those times may have been 30 years ago, when it comes to recycling and some of the good it is doing for the environment.

It was 30 years ago, in 1981, that a few visionaries in Ontario thought it might be a good idea to start community-wide recycling drives in towns and cities across the province, and it sparked a ‘Blue Box’ recycling revolution that eventually spread across the continent.

Since then, the Blue Box – a container that has become as commonplace in most homes across North America as a television or refrigerator – has reached a milestone that comes just as Niagara’s regional government observes the launch, with private contractor Emterra Environmental, of a curbside collection program that places more emphasis on recycling than ever before.

Starting this February 28, Emterra’s collection trucks, with the words; ‘More Recycling, Less Waste’ emblazoned on their trucks, began rolling out to neighbourhoods across Niagara for the first time. They and their crews are doing so under rules that limit the number of garbage bags, destined to the garbage dump to one bag a week, and allows us people living in single-family homes and apartments with two to six units will now be able to put their Blue Boxes containing bottles and cans, and their Grey Boxes containing paper and bundled plastic bags at curbside every week instead of on alternating weeks.

That change, combined with the Green Bins for compostable wastes, should make it easier than ever before for the average householder to limit the amount of garbage destined for a landfill site to be limited to one bag or can a week.

Most importantly, if we residents make maximum use of these boxes and bins, the regional government should be able to meet its target of keeping at least 65 per cent of our household wastes out of dumps. It’s a target that shouldn’t be hard to hit given that the average Niagara householder is already recycling 44 per cent of the waste we place at our curbs.
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In a world where too much of the progress environmentalists have made over the past three decades has been rolled back as governments cut funding for green programs, the growth of recycling across our region offers some optimism since the first Blue Boxes made their appearance in neighbourhoods in the Kitchener area all those years ago.

When I began covering environmental issues for a daily newspaper in Niagara 32 years ago, there were only a handful of community groups doing a bit of newspaper recycling here. A then-fledgling outfit called Niagara Recycling was taking the paper and shipping it off to paper-makers that would reuse it in their products. Residents could call Niagara Recycling to have their old newspapers, along with glass jars and metal cans, picked up at curbside.

That was the beginning of curbside recycling in Niagara and it was not well known to many residents unless the odd reporter, like this one, wrote a few stories about it.

It wasn’t until a few years later that a guy named Nyle Ludolph, then a manager for Laidlaw, the company operating the Blue Box program in Kitchener, showed up at a public meeting in Niagara to promote the program with one of the boxes sitting on a table to his side. No one in municipal life seemed more interested in this than Eric Bergenstein, who was Pelham’s mayor at the time. And in 1985, Pelham became the first municipality in Niagara and one of the very few beyond the Waterloo area at the time to adopt the Blue Box program.

There were still plenty of doubters here in Niagara, Ontario. More than a few of our municipal politicians and public works staff wondered if residents would “go to the trouble” to sort their newspapers, jars and cans and use the cans. But the people of Pelham proved the doubters wrong and within a few short years, Niagara Recycling was picking up Blue Box materials in Thorold, Niagara Falls, Welland and Port Colborne.

Despite pressure from its citizens, St. Catharines lagged behind some of these other municipalities in adopting the Blue Box even though one of its residents played a key role in promoting recycling across the region. That resident was St. Catharines current Mayor, Brian McMullan, who was the manager of Niagara Recycling at the time.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s when our regional government assumed responsibilities for managing our household wastes from the local municipalities, and to this day when a regionally operated program makes it possible to offer virtually every householder in Niagara the same level of service. You can now arrange a tour the recycling plant our regional government operates in Niagara Falls in partnership with the old Niagara Recycling firm and see the thousands of tones of recyclables that are processed through that plant every single day.

Thirty years ago, all of that waste – now being recycled for use in new products all over the world – would have been buried in landfill sites that, quite understandably, no one wants their backyard. And that is enough reason to celebrate the birth and growth of Blue Box recycling – a green program that had its genesis right here in Ontario, 30 years ago.

To learn more about Niagara, Ontario’s recycling program visit www.niagararegion.ca and follow the links

(Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater Niagara region and beyond.)