As books of any kind cannot be put in residential recycling carts, the City of Penticton, B.C., recently launched a pilot project to help properly recycle local books.
According to Penticton’s sustainability coordinator, Madison Poultney, the project has been successful so far.
“We found, after doing recycling audits throughout Penticton, that hardcover books were a large contributor to our contamination rates. We thought why not come up with an easy and accessible way for people to properly recycle their books, especially targeting the books that can’t necessarily be sold or donated,” said Poultney.
“It’s really awesome because we’ve seen a lot of interest in it — so far we’ve actually been able to divert 12,300 pounds of books from the landfill, so it’s been a really successful program.”
The city first launched the three-month pilot project for book recycling back in January.
The bins are located in the lobby of Penticton Public Library and people can drop off any damaged and outdated books that are not good for donation and cannot be recycled along with other paper products.
“It’s really awesome that we can provide the community with an easy way to dispose of … their old books,” said Poultney.
The books are then collected and brought to Planet Earth Recycling in West Kelowna, where the facility sorts the books into two categories: good books, and bad books.
According to Planet Earth Recycling president, Paul Marois, the good books are ones that can be possibly resold while the bad books are sorted for recycling.
“The second category being bad books — things like damaged books, encyclopedias, foreign language books, Reader’s Digest,” said Marois.
“Those we will recycle by chopping the spines and the covers off of them so that we can recover the paper for recycling.”
Planet Earth is the only facility in the region that collects and recycles books and the facility has been operating a book recycling program for more than a decade.
“We process approximately 40,000 pounds a month of good books,” said Marois.
“We’re capturing from a number of different school districts, as well as libraries, friends of the libraries. We have bins in landfills up in the Shuswap and the thrift stores as well.”
Meanwhile, the pilot project in Penticton was supposed to end this month, but according to the city, it could be extended.
“We definitely want to keep it running for the next year, at least,” said Poultney.
“As long as we keep seeing those numbers go up, then we’ll definitely just keep it here and just keep providing that service for people.”
The city’s goal is to lower the community’s recycling contamination rate from 13.3 per cent to 10 per cent, or lower, by November.
Not meeting its goals, set out by Recycle BC, could lead to increased costs to deliver the program as a result of fines and less convenient recycling service.
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