Following concerns about Green For Life's recycling practices, the District of Squamish has released a statement about its recycling program.
Green For Life Environmental Inc. was one of the subjects of a CBC Marketplace investigation.
Squamish’s Green For Life Environmental Inc. handles waste in the district. It’s a different division than what was featured in the CBC report.
CBC reports that it bought bales of film plastic ready for recycling, hid trackers in them and asked three companies — one being GFL — to process the material.
Two of the three trackers placed on the GFL bales were not recycled but went straight to an incinerator. The third tracker stopped functioning and CBC was unable to trace its location.
In the CBC report, GFL is said to have responded by saying, "The current market conditions do not have many opportunities to recycle this kind of plastic. We found a viable and cost-effective solution in incineration."
The District said that as a result of the report, "a number of residents have contacted the District of Squamish for reassurance on the processing of Squamish recycling."
In response, the municipality put out a statement saying that it provides residential curbside collection through a partnership with Recycle BC and a contract relationship with Squamish’s Green For Life (GFL).
Recycle BC is a service that manages residential recycling on behalf of municipalities for the majority of the province and is responsible for the processing of the recycling.
In turn, Recycle BC contracts Squamish’s GFL to collect residential curbside recycling and deliver it to Recycle BC-approved processing facilities.
The District pointed out that Recycle BC has issued a statement in response to the CBC report.
"The transactions that Marketplace executed as part of its story were one-time, business-to-business transactions outside of the Recycle BC program," reads the Recycle BC response.
"They did not leverage or reflect the rigorous processes that underpin Recycle BC's full producer responsibility system, which Recycle BC shared with them but were not reflected in the report."
It continues: "We track the end market destination for our collected materials through a chain of custody process. Our process demands full traceability and auditability of all shipments to end markets or disposal, using documentation to verify where materials are shipped from and where they are sent.
Our contracts stipulate that Recycle BC must approve the end markets for all of our materials before they are transferred. In the case of plastic, 99 percent remains in Canada. This end market is Merlin Plastics, who was found in the report to have recycled the plastic it received."
Merlin Plastics was the only company in the CBC report that was found to have recycled the plastic during the investigation.
