Toronto is willing to take on Tim Hortons, refusing to back down from its threat to outlaw disposable paper cups with plastic lids despite the coffee chain’s opposition.
“I’m astounded that we have companies that say, “˜You know what, we don’t want to give you things that can be recycled,’ “ said Glenn De Baeremaeker, chair of the public works committee, which this week introduced a strategy to slash the amount of packaging in landfills. “We produce 365 million coffee cups a year and right now all of them are going into a garbage dump. That’s crazy. That’s not sustainable.”
On Tuesday, the city gave Tim Hortons and other hot-drink vendors until the end of 2009 to find a paper lid for their cups or switch to Styrofoam, which can soon be thrown in the blue box. The ban – which must be approved by city council – would facilitate Toronto’s recycling program because plastic lids “contaminate” the paper fibre it sells to tissue mills.
But a Tim Hortons vice-president said the Canadian coffee company would “absolutely not” consider changing its cup because it already can be, and is, fully recycled – including in cities right on Toronto’s doorstep.
“Bottom line is, our cup is recyclable as we speak. The lid is recyclable,” said Nick Javor, senior vice-president of corporate affairs. “So to ban the cup outright because the current city of Toronto system doesn’t accommodate it, we’re obviously incredibly dismayed.”
Indeed, Hamilton collects paper cups through its composting program, said Pat Parker, the city’s manager of solid waste planning.
“The paper coffee cups are accepted in our green cart program. Styrofoam ones go in the blue box,” she said. “The lids all go in the blue box.”
People are supposed to detach the lid from the cup, but if they don’t they can be sorted later.
“We don’t seem to have too much problem,” she said. “They get removed at the composting facility through a screening process.”
York Region, which takes in the waste from Vaughan, Newmarket and Aurora, accepts paper cups in the blue box. The lid is supposed to be separated beforehand. If it is not, a regional spokesperson said, there is some contamination that the user of the paper fibre has to deal with later.
By Toronto’s own admission, it’s not that the city can’t recycle paper cups with plastic lids, it’s that it simply doesn’t want to.
A city report on the proposed packaging policy said Toronto could buy an optical sorting machine to separate the two materials, but the equipment would cost $3-million and the processing could run about $1-million a year.
And Toronto is skeptical that people would follow the instructions to separate the two pieces on their own, said Mr. De Baeremaeker, which is why the goal is for industry to produce an all-paper or a Styrofoam cup that could be tossed in the blue bin whole.
Toronto could recycle plastic lids and paper cups separately if people disconnected the parts right now, he added, but predicted if the city announced the addition of the items to the recycling regimen immediately more than half would still come in attached.
“When people say – and it’s a legitimate question – “˜Well if you just separate the lid from the cup, isn’t the problem solved? Yes it is solved if everybody does it. But our experience after 20 years of recycling is not everybody does it.”
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