The province is letting Halifax ship its garbage mountain of trash bags to another Nova Scotia dump.
The department of environment announced the temporary exemption in provincial recycling law on Friday.
The change lasts for six months and only applies to the Halifax Regional Municipality’s dumping of plastic shopping bags and the plastic wrap around commercial products such as toilet paper and water bottles.
“This is only a temporary measure,” minister Iain Rankin said in an accompanying press release. “Nova Scotia is a leader in recycling and waste diversion, and we will continue to be.”
Several hundred tonnes of Halifax’s plastic bags have been rotting (or whatever plastics do) at a storage facility since last August, as a result of China’s decision to no longer import recyclables due to environmental and health concerns.
The municipality, and West Hants landfill operator Green for Life, had requested a temporary reprieve from the province to skirt laws banning recyclable materials in Nova Scotian landfills.
When that took too long, the municipality started sending its 300 tonnes of recyclable plastics to an out-of-province dump. As reported elsewhere, three tractor-trailer loads of plastics have already been shipped.
The municipality refused to disclose where the materials were going, other than it was potentially “even further west than Ontario.”
According to CBC, the municipality has found a recycling source for newly trashed film plastics, but the materials in storage were too degraded for that option.
Halifax’s manager of solid waste, Matt Keliher, writes in today’s release that putting the film plastics in a landfill is a last resort: “We have been actively looking for new markets and will continue to do that in the months to come.”
Prior to China’s announcement last year, 80 percent of the city’s recyclables were sent to Asia.
According to Friday’s press release, “other applications for a variance will be considered promptly.”
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This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2018.
This situation only further highlights the need for us to reduce or eliminate single-use plastics. Montreal recently banned single-use plastic bags across the entire city. It’s time that Halifax show similar leadership! We need to be responsible for the waste we create – it doesn’t just vanish when the trucks come on Tuesday morning. Extended producer responsibility for packaging and a ban on single-use plastics would go a long way toward eliminating this problem at the source.
How do plastics degrade in storage? Isn’t the whole point of plastic wrap that it doesn’t degrade? And if it does degrade, why didn’t past loads of plastic degrade during the trips on a container ship on the way to China?
Not sure if it’s better to bury or burn the plastic. If this plastic was shipped to LaFarge maybe they would burn fewer tires.
In the story, I fail to see the counter-argument. Please explain why you believe that shipping them across the country is better than burying them. Obviously the decision is based on reducing carbon footprint. With the reduction of carbon footprint being the basis for Environmental Management standards, then it is clear that burying them is the best option.
It would be ideal if you could ever write one story – just one – where you fully explore the issue rather than leaving out the bits that reduce the sensationalism. You are continuously leaving out important facts of your stories.
I might remind you that you are simply a small, Indie paper with limited circulation and readership. If you want to grow up and be recognized then you must learn to gain recognition true quality writing.