A friend of mine recently told me this, and I didn’t believe that Calgary doesn’t have a curbside recycling program. She also said that her apartment building didn’t have a recycling program.
I visited the city of Calgary’s website, and read the following:
Calgary’s recycling program works through a system of 48 Neighbourhood Recycling Depots where residents can drop off their mixed paper, cardboard, newspaper, magazines, clear or colored glass, metal, milk cartons or jugs and plastic bags for recycling.
They’ve apparently had this program since “the early 1990s”. That’s a bit sad–I can remember dropping off stuff at Vancouver’s depots with my Dad in the early 1980s. And I believe we got our blue boxes in the early nineties.
There’s apparently a private recycling service to which you can subscribe, but surely the richest city in the country can afford to spend some cash on enabling their citizens to recycle at the curb?
After all, Calgary isn’t pulling its own weight. From the city of Calgary’s website:
In 2003 alone, an amazing 29 million kilograms of material was successfully recycled.
That’s 29 kg for every citizen. I checked out Vancouver’s program (PDF), and Vancouver residents recycled 266,606 tons. That works out to about 125 kg per citizen. Clearly Calgary needs to suck it up.
I was reminded of this topic by a self-described Recycling Bitch Sarah. She’s running a poll about mandatory recycling on Change Everything. Given CE’s audience, the results are pretty predictable.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Here on the south shore of Quebec City, we have big bins on wheels, paid by the city and emptied once every two weeks.
The city recuperates 31% of the household garbage.
Calgary, you suck. 🙂
Brem…you suck a ss
Halifax has had wet/dry recycling (that is, they will pick up your compost) for several years and it’s been very successful. Where is green Vancouver on this?
Gwen: I agree. A city official recently told me that 48% of Vancouver’s landfills is organic waste. Mind you, I don’t know where they’d put all that composted material. What does Halifax do with it?
Ironically, This weekend’s Sunday Edition (the CBC) had a piece on the success of Edmonton’s recycling / waste management program:
http://www.cbc.ca/radioshows/THE_SUNDAY_EDITION/20070204.shtml
Sounds like all the makings for a nice inter-provincial shame campaign are in place 😉
Cheers,
A.
Doesn’t it strike you as a bit worrisome that the private recycling program can’t run on a cost-recovery basis? One way or another, they charge $125/a for recycling.
I’ll make the random guess that economies of scale are rougly cancelled out by the addition of a public service layer, and suggest that a city-wide recycling program would cost about $125/a for each household.
That seems like a pretty crummy deal unless the city is running out of landfill room. Which is a real issue for a lot of places.
Hey Darren,
I’m actually not the one running the poll.. but I thought it was worth linking to.
Funny that I actually grew up in Calgary, and still somehow managed to become The Recycling Bitch. 😉
Grande Prairie and Saskatoon have the same recycling programs as Calgary’s. No pick up, but you can take your stuff to blue bins.
Someone was telling me that when they lived in Nanaimo, they were fined if they didn’t recycle their juice containers, etc. I think that’s a good idea and would encourage some people out here who aren’t as enviro conscious.
@Ryan:
I think the real question is not what it costs to recycle, but what it costs not to.
If we will not reduce our consumption (another topic entirely), then recycling at least mitigates some of the grosser effects. Any associated cost could be considered a base-level consumption tax.
Those monies are in turn offset at the municipal level by savings in landfill space, waste processing and streaming, and the costs of continually burying an expanding pile of materials, including some very lethal toxics that are deliberately concealed among more mundane stuff.
$125 seems cheap at the price. And I doubt that the public service layer adds anything. Purely private provision of waste disposal results in collusion and overcharging, also cancelling economies of scale.
And in any case, this is the twenty-first century, no? Surely Calagary should try to catch up with the late twentieth at least?
How does a blue box recycling prevent lethal toxics in the landfill?
Granted, though: if land costs are high enough, a recycling program can be a justifiable intervention.
The dichotomies behind what recycling costs, how good it makes people feel, and what it really accomplishes amuse me.
Note that materials which are actually valuable enough to recycle (aluminum is the poster child here, because smelting bauxite takes such enormous amounts of energy that recycling is a cheap way to “make” aluminum) are already very well-recycled by programs that have little to do with blue boxes.
(For the record, I diligently sort my recyclables. I cannot explain why. Probably social pressure, and to stay within weekly unrecycled trash limits).
I think San Fransisco has got it right! http://www.sunsetscavenger.com/index.htm I don’t want to sound too lazy, but with life being so hectic it is a pain to have to drive my recycling to a bin. I am looking at getting recycling for a monthly cost to me for curb side pick up, but there have been times when I couldn’t afford it. I would absolutely recycle if curb side pick was an option!
I live in Calgary, and I also think it’s ridiculous!! The only private recycling program isn’t even in my neighborhood, in fact it’s not even in my NE corner of the city, which is so frustrating.
They have resolved to have a curbside recycling program established for the year 2009, but I just don’t think it’s soon enough. Seriously, how long does it take them to get it together. Do it asap, it’s sooooo important.
I’m fighting for it, really. We (Calgarians) just really have to work on standing up for things like this… but unfortunately for most, it’s all on the back-burner.
I have just been in Calgary for the holidays and was surprised to see that it doesn’t have a blue box program. Watching people the day after Christmas just throwing everything and anything into the dumpsters made me very upset to say the least. I asked one person who i watched unload the cardboard box of his brand new 42” flatscreen tv into a dumpster where the nearest recycling depot was and he just rolled his eyes and explained that it was too bloody far to drive all the way there every week, saying it was a waste of gas!!,I know that this is not representative of everyone in the city of Calgary by any means but it sure would be nice to see a city with money to burn enter the 21st century.
Let’s hope they catch on soon.
Calgary has better shit to about then a fucking blue box shit like lok at calgarys housing. We might be the richest city but we still have problems .Atleast by haveing depots Calgarians can get cash back by recycling so they can pay off there super high bullshit rents also.
I sadly live in Calgary now. I moved from Toronto where I lived all of my life. Yes, it is very sad that Calgary does not have a normal cubside recycling system. It should be an option if somebody wants to drive to go and recycle their used cans. In Toronto there are people who purposely choose to not own cars because of all the pollution it causes. I wonder how those same people would get around to recycling their cans etc here in this city stuck in the 70’s… take it with them on the bus? bike ride with their bottles of plastic?
at least the blue bin is coming in by Jan 09.
but if you are in a condo, you don’t get it. you have to go with a company like http://www.calgarycityrecycling.com
Since this post came along, Calgary has implemented the garish blue boxes alongside the curbs of its houses. The charge appears on our electrical bill and it is NOT an option and that’s not right.
Eventually, this global mobilization of a recycling initiative will reveal itself to be a heavy waste of money from a cost-recovery point of view. It’s grown to the point that it’s a social issue now and anyone who doesn’t recycle–regardless of their reasoning–is lambasted by hordes of people for being anti-environment or “not living in the 21st century.” Most of the people who judge others for not recycling are just a part of the cultural conglomerate and don’t actually think about or research what the actual impact of recycling really is.
Look, nobody wants the planet to burn and nobody wants to live amongst trash everywhere they go–but choosing not to recycle is not an automatic subscription to “anti-environmentalism”, if such a thing exists. When I think about the environment, I think about what immediately surrounds me on a day-to-day basis–and you should too! If everyone did, we wouldn’t need the television media and the government to tell us what we should and should not be doing. And unfortunately, that’s where most people get their information about recycling; instead of cleaning the house responsibly and making their own personal environment a better place, they push that aside and start a lobby group to get blue plastic bins installed beside the black ones in every cubicle in the country. That’s because almost the entire world has tricked themselves into believing that they feel better putting bottles into that one instead of into the garbage without even THINKING about it.
I’m glad that “being green”, or at least thinking that you’re being green, makes people happy, but that is the only reason I can think of that justifies the by-now out-of-control growth of this movement. When a bottle strikes the bottom of a recycling bin, it may put a smile on the recycler’s face, but everything that happens to it after that is not really representative of what they stand for. To this day, despite improvements in the technology, it still costs more to recycle a plastic bottle than it does to make a new one. I don’t really understand the rationale behind paying a premium for a lower-quality product just because it was made out of a cheaper, higher-quality product–but that’s the way the world is going. People will pay out of their own pocket just to “know” they they are helping the environment.
I know that most of the world just has this love affair with recycling that is too sacred to be broken in the face of reason, but please remember that the real GREEN that affects you is money, not the environment. You, your children and their children will NEVER live to see the day when the landfills are so full that garbage leaks into the streets, oxygen masks are needed to breathe the air and non-organic food is made illegal. It will not happen–but just in case it does, you will be taxed, your children will be taxed and their children will be taxed. Sometimes it will be in the name of the environment, like the aforementioned curbside program, but the people pulling the strings are really in it for the real green and it’s important to ask who’s making money when you spend your own on recycled paper towels and is it really making YOUR environment a better place than what you could make of it for free?