How Much Will Your Family Have to Pay for New Municipal Recycling Programs?

Why isn't Ontario Sweden?

I won’t be the first guy you’ll hear complaining about all the money and effort that goes into municipal recycling programs. It sure doesn’t feel like those efforts are accomplishing their goals. Unless, of course, those goals included funding the recycling contractors.

All the way back in 1996, John Tierney published “Recycling Is Garbage” in the New York Times Magazine. Even then, Tierney argued that mandatory recycling programs were often economically inefficient and environmentally unnecessary. His belief was that well-designed landfills - when properly regulated - provide a safe and, in many locations, easily available alternative for waste disposal.

But then there’s Sweden, which recycles 99 percent of its household waste and has even been known to import trash to feed the “waste-to-energy” program that powers over a million homes and heats another 680,000.

Why can’t we do that, too? Perhaps we could. But emulating Sweden would require a comprehensive landfill ban, legally binding waste hierarchy enforcement, and decades of incremental legislation leading to a Producer Responsibility Ordinance. None of which comes cost-free.

In a few weeks, Ontario’s multi-year transition to Extended Producer Responsibility will finally (sort of) complete. From January 1st, 2026, the province’s municipalities will no longer share any responsibility for collecting and processing designated household packaging products made of plastics, glass, metals, and paper. Instead, the Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act, 2016 (RRCEA) requires brand owners, first importers, and certain retailers to foot the bill through a non-profit called Circular Materials.

However, following public consultations in June, the Environmental Registry of Ontario decided to scale back some of their requirements. Due to higher than expected costs and market uncertainty, full implementation is now only anticipated by 2032. As far as I can tell, municipalities will still be off the hook for running the programs in the new year, but mandatory recovery targets won’t meet initial expectations.

Perhaps their early planning was a bit over-optimistic. But even I have to admit that an open and flexible review program is a sign of healthy governance.

What are the economic consequences of the change? Well, Ontario municipalities stand to save a total of $156 million a year. Toronto alone will see $40-50 million in savings. But you can bet that money has already been spent a half a dozen times over, so I’d be shocked if anyone’s property tax bills actually fell.

Expanding the range of items that can be diverted to recycling programs could save money on landfill maintenance. But I also doubt that any such savings would find their way back to the bank accounts of real human beings. In Toronto at least, garbage removal is currently funded as a direct user fee: I pay around $390 a year for solid waste pickup. But even before the diversion plan was scaled back, I saw no talk of reducing those fees.

Someone’s obviously going to have to pay for this program. In theory, that would be commercial producers and importers. However, they’ll obviously pass the extra costs along to their customers through higher prices.

With so many unknowns, it would be impossible to guess at the extra expenses that’ll hit the average Ontario household. None of the various government agencies and organizations involved seem to have done any of their own math.

Which begs some questions:

• Did anyone in a position of responsibility even try to estimate how much this transition will likely cost Ontario residents?

• If they did, why have those estimates not be made public?

• Has anyone compared those costs to expanding low-cost and low-tech landfill alternatives?

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