Mattresses to garden mulch, fire hoses to zoo beds: There's more to recycling than the blue bin

I drink a ton of bottled water and often eat microwaveable meals that come in cardboard packaging. Last week I transferred a mountain of recycling from the big cupboard under the sink and the blue box to the recycling wheelie bin for pickup.

Watching the level in the bin rise drastically as I added it was a humbling experience. 

Generally, once I've put out my recycling, I don't think much else about it. After all, I'm doing my bit, aren't I? 

Well, maybe not.

New rules

As well as generating a scary amount of packaging, I haven't been paying enough attention to the new rules.

In my defence, they haven't been widely publicized till lately.

Those black plastic microwave trays that are marked as recyclable? They're not. Ditto for disposable coffee cups, Styrofoam, plastic bags and more.

The glorious days of guilt-free and lazy recycling are mostly over.

China is cleaning up from under piles of our plastics after accepting about 45 per cent of all plastic trash since 1992. As they try to meet new environmental standards, no longer is it out of sight, out of mind, while our dirty, semi-sorted recyclables take the slow boat to China.

They've instituted stringent new regulations requiring baled plastics and papers to contain no more than 0.5 per cent contaminants.

To meet the new rules, greasy, cheesy pizza boxes, bits of Styrofoam, soiled paper and bits of glass can't find their way into the recycling box.

Saskatoon is considering following the lead of other cities and banning glass bottles and jars from their recycling program entirely as approximately 90 per cent of them break over everything else by the time they're sorted.

Luckily some Winnipeg non-profit and social enterprises are reclaiming materials before we even have to wonder if they're recyclable.

Textiles aren't recyclable, but no matter; local thrift stores have been taking our used clothing and gently used household goods and selling them to raise money for social programs for years. Where would we be without them?

ArtsJunktion gets an A for its reclamation efforts.

The busy depot accepts donations of fabrics, paper, cardboard and much more. They're sorted, weighed and then put out to be reclaimed on a pay-what-you-can basis by teachers, artists, crafters and community members looking for arts and craft supplies.

Materials leaving the depot are also weighed so the non-profit keeps track of how much they diverted from the landfill; it amounted to a whopping 2,000 kilograms a month last year.

Mother Earth Recycling is an entirely Indigenous owned and operated recycling program and social enterprise that runs six-month training programs for urban Indigenous community members with barriers to employment.

Your old computers will give their trainees valuable work experience in refurbishing computers.

Mattresses and box springs can be recycled for a $15 fee. After decontamination, each piece will be painstakingly taken apart so the components can be recycled. Foam becomes carpet underlay, wood becomes garden mulch, metal is sold as scrap and so on.

Best of all, each mattress recycled is one that won't join the estimated 40,000 dropped off at the landfill every year.

The Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service now partners with Firefighters Without Borders to recycle their protective gear.

By law, it has to be retired after 10 years of use, but if it is still good it goes to firemen in countries such as St. Lucia in the Caribbean. The organization also trains them extensively in the use of the protective gear as well as in up-to-date firefighting practices. 

Old leaky fire hoses go to community centres around the city so they can flood their skating rinks.

More recently, they also have been creatively repurposed by the zookeepers at Assiniboine Park Zoo, who remake them into furnishings such as hammocks for baby snow leopards and perches for some of the birds. They also use them to create enrichment toys for many of the animals in the zoo.

As we strive to be more environmentally conscious, it makes more sense to support local enterprises in their community-building initiatives than to add to the landfill or blithely assume a full recycling bin means we're doing our part.

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