Most of Quebec’s recycled glass is turned into powder instead of being blown again
Even though the city website tells people in nearly half of Montreal’s 19 boroughs that they can put glass in their blue bin or bag, not all of them do.
The company Ricova runs the sorting center in the city’s Saint-Michel neighborhood, where recycling from eight boroughs is taken. The recycling from the 11 other boroughs goes to a new $47 million facility in Lachine. This facility is run by Société VIA, another company hired by the city.
Both sorting centers have had trouble cleaning glass and separating it from other recyclables. The Saint-Michel center is the latest to be criticized for not even trying.
The 20,000 tons of glass that Ricova collects in Montreal either goes to landfills or is ground into a powder and used instead of sand to cover landfills. At the end of each day, a cover is put over the garbage in a landfill to keep smells and flies down and keep animals from getting in.
Recycling advocate Karel Ménard said of using glass powder as landfill cover, “It’s basically a fancy dump.”
Ménard said that the Quebec government has given permission for the practice as a stopgap measure until it can come up with better ways to recycle glass. The government has never put a limit on how thick this cover can be, so it may often be thicker than it needs to be, he said.
The boroughs where Ricova collects recycling are: Plateau-Mont-Royal, Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension, Montréal-Nord, Anjou, Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Saint-Léonard and Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles.
Pierre Beaudoin, who lives in Plateau, has spent years carefully cleaning and recycling glass bottles.
“I was surprised to find out that so many boroughs do this bad thing of making us think we are recycling,” said Beaudoin. “It makes me nervous.”
Ricova says it can’t buy better equipment because its contract with the city is up in 2024.The city isn’t going to renew that contract, so the Saint-Michel center will close and be replaced by a new one being built in eastern Montreal.
Glass can be recycled indefinitely, but Quebec hardly does it
Glass is one of the most recyclable materials when it isn’t mixed with other things. It can be melted down and blown again and again, and it takes a lot less energy than making glass from scratch.
But Quebec has had trouble recycling glass since about 20 years ago, when it stopped making people sort their own trash and instead hired companies to do it after curbside pickup.
Since then, Menard says that none of the glass found on the side of roads in Quebec can be used to make glass bottles again. A lot of it gets broken and gets mixed in with other recyclables like paper and cardboard. Most of the things that can be saved are turned into things that are used in building, sandblasting, or pool filters.
This is the case with the 12,000 tonnes of glass that the Lachine sorting center gets and pays to send to Groupe Bellemare, a company in the Mauricie region of Quebec.
“It’s all very cloudy,” Menard said, pointing out that it’s not clear if all of the glass Bellemare buys can be changed. He doesn’t understand why the company wants money for the glass.
Bellemare told CBC News that it can’t handle both the glass from Lachine and the glass from the Saint-Michel sorting center.
The City of Montreal knows that the current systems aren’t perfect.
“Modernization is the answer,” said Marie-Andrée Mauger, the mayor of the borough of Verdun and a member of the executive committee in charge of the environment. “We need to take the glass out of it before we put it in the recycling bin.”
Ontario and Maritimes glass is used in a factory in Montreal
In May, Quebec again put off a program that would have done this. The deposit system for glass and plastic, which had been promised for November 2023, is now set for 2025.
In the meantime, an organization calledhas set up about 100 deposit boxes in Quebec.Opération verre-vert, four of them in Montreal. On the group’s website, which is in French, you can find out where they are.
Last year, the province put $21 million into the Owens-Illinois glass factory in Montreal so that it could handle the glass from the new deposit system.
Ménard says that the factory is the biggest one of its kind in eastern North America that can recycle glass. Yet, it can’t use much of the recycled glass in Quebec. Instead, it uses glass from Ontario and the Maritimes to make bottles.