Styrofoam go at depot
St. Albert residents can finally recycle their Styrofoam stockpiles now that a pilot project has taken off at the recycling depot.
The city’s yearlong $12,000 expanded polystyrene recycling pilot project officially launched July 1. St. Albert residents can now drop any unwanted clean white expanded polystyrene (commonly known by the trade-name Styrofoam) blocks into the black crates at the back of the Mike Mitchell Recycling Depot on Chevigny Street for collection and compaction.
Styrofoam is recyclable but not accepted in the city’s blue-bag program because it breaks into tiny bits that are impractical to separate from other materials. That’s meant that residents either had to try and cram the giant bricks into their brown bins, stockpile them, or (more recently in the case of cleaned meat trays) take them to London Drugs. (While the London Drugs website says meat trays are only accepted at B.C. locations, the St. Albert London Drugs confirmed this week that it was in fact accepting those items.)
During debates on changes to the city’s blue-bag recycling program last fall, city council heard that other jurisdictions had figured out how to recycle Styrofoam at low cost. Council voted last February to try out Styrofoam recycling at the depot.
City waste diversion program supervisor Olivia Kwok said that the city had collected several bags of bricks at the depot that were now ready for processing by the Calgary-based company Styro-Go.
Styrofoam is so light and bulky that it’s usually not economical to recycle, said Robert Herritt, president of Styro-Go – you’d spend $500 to ship $100 worth of material.
His company, which operates throughout Western Canada, gets around that problem with a compactor that fits in a five-tonne truck. Using heat and pressure, the device can turn a 53-foot trailer full of Styrofoam into a 70-pound brick the size of a small fridge in an hour that can be stored for shipment. The company typically sells about 55 tonnes of these bricks a month to plastics manufacturers in Brazil, Spain, China, and Vietnam.
If you can afford to ship it, there’s actually a lot of demand for polystyrene on the market because it’s so versatile, Herritt said. It’s light, resists mould and bacteria, doesn’t break down (which is also why it’s an environmental headache), and can be made to look like wood, marble, and other materials. Manufacturers often turn recycled Styrofoam into picture frames or baseboards or use it as recycled content in other plastic items.
Herritt said Styro-Go usually processes one or two loads a month from its client communities (such as Strathcona County) and two a week from Trail Appliances in Calgary.
While the compactor can take pretty much any type of Styrofoam, Herritt and Kwok said St. Albert was sticking with just clean white bricks for this pilot. Dirty or coloured Styrofoam and Styrofoam take-out containers, meat trays, cups, plates, and peanuts would be rejected.
Council will get an update on the Styrofoam pilot in about six months.
Big blue box?
Recycling depot visitors might have noticed the big blue box covered with butterflies that showed up at the front gate last week.
That’s part of the city’s $35,000 extended hours pilot for the depot, which will see the depot open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on non-holiday Mondays from July 7 to Sept. 30, Kwok said. (The depot is normally closed on Monday and Sunday.)
The pilot aims to track when people are using the depot and what proportion of guests are from out of town, Kwok said. Crews have set up shop in the blue-and-butterfly-bedecked office used by the International Children’s Festival and will be asking visitors for their driver’s license or home address as they arrive.
City council is to get a report on this pilot later this fall.
