Recycle NB through the years

Celebrating 15 years of recycling designated materials 

We are celebrating a special milestone this month at Recycle NB. It is our 15th year as the agency responsible for recycling programs for designated materials in New Brunswick.

Fifteen years. That’s relatively young. However, we feel we have accomplished a lot in that short amount of time. Here are just a few key highlights:

• We have recycled approximately 19 million scrap tires since 2008.
• Almost 3.9 million litres of waste paint have been collected since 2009.
• More than 30 million litres of oil and 1 million litres of glycol have been collected since 2014.
• 5,700 metric tonnes of end-of-life electronics has been diverted from landfills since 2017.

Keeping these materials from our landfills can only have had a positive impact on our environment, especially when you think about how waste was historically managed in our province. Fifty years ago, garbage was taken to local dumps and either burned or buried. This had devastating effects on our air quality, our drinking water, our forests – our environment as a whole.

In the mid-1980s, the Department of Environment and Local Government changed how waste was managed in New Brunswick. It eliminated more than 300 open-trench dumpsites and created 12 Regional Service Commissions which would assume responsibility for all solid waste management in their respective regions. The dumpsites were replaced with six second-generation landfill sites situated throughout the province. These are fully contained, monitored sites which include a composite liner consisting of geomembranes and natural substances, a leachate collection and treatment system, and a landfill gas management system.

This move alone resulted in significant improvements to our environment, but in the 1990s, the province went a step further and created the first provincial recycling programs with the beverage container program and the Tire Stewardship Board. The Tire Stewardship Board’s role was to implement a system to collect scrap tires and recycle the rubber into new products, such as livestock mats, garden mulch and more.

Fast forward to 2008. Recycle NB was established under the Designated Materials Regulation – Clean Environment Act. At the time, we took over the responsibilities of the Tire Stewardship Board, as well as introduced a new provincial recycling program for waste paint. The paint program would become the province’s first under the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) model, which obligated brand owners to pay for the collection, storage, transportation and recycling of their products.

Over the past 15 years, Recycle NB’s mandate has expanded to include five more EPR programs, including oil/glycol, electronics, packaging and paper products, pharmaceutical products and medical sharps, and beverage containers. The last three programs are still in development and are expected to launch over the next year.

When these new programs do launch, we will be in a position to add significantly to the statistics quoted above. In other words, we can expect amazing things over the next 15 years.

We would be remiss if we neglected to mention a very important part of this story. YOU. We may have helped put the systems in place, but you are the ones who take the time and make the effort to recycle these and other products. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. We look forward to continued successes in the years to come.