The duty published on January 26 the text “Waste management is not improving in Quebec, concludes the BAPE”. However, the signal was clear when China stopped importing our recycled materials for the same reasons that the BAPE cites in its report. The problem with recycling in Quebec is that we confuse recycling with collection: compressing poorly sorted and dirty materials into bales does not constitute recycling. Moreover, the show Investigation of Radio-Canada recently confirmed this mystification fairly well.
Sorting centers must be required to package materials in ready-to-manufacture formats. It is therefore necessary to pick them up correctly, sort them finely and package them perfectly. To do this, it will be necessary to return to the collection of a sorting done at home, as it was done at the beginning. Thus, materials already sorted and washed by citizens would greatly facilitate the process. The collection could be less important at the beginning, but we need recyclable materials locally, and not waste.
Also, what happens to printers, game consoles, computers? Where do the materials for the “sertplusarian” cases go? What about the irons, coffee machines, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners… that we bring to the ecocentres? It is necessary to organize and systematize the recovery process in order to supply dismantling workshops to recover and sort these precious materials with more advanced physical properties than those of the packaging materials so that they can be used for useful objects that we will manufacture locally. . Dismantling exists in a Coaticook plant for dehumidifiers and air conditioning units; the materials are perfectly sorted there. There is also a factory in Bécancour that completely recovers refrigerators, by the tens of thousands each year. It correctly sorts plastics, metals and glass, and extracts oil, refrigerant gas from compressors, but also blown insulation with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are more damaging than refrigerant gases. These materials, once packaged in a factory north of Montreal, are ready to manufacture products. It’s still too little.
At the Applied Sustainability Workshop, we are designing a new type of sustainable refrigerator, and we are moving into the prototyping phase in 2022 by understanding the moment when we will want to source local low-carbon materials, i.e. that is to say the materials for recovery and dismantling, for the production of the 5,000 aircraft in the first year. These materials are the basis of the lowest possible carbon footprint, which makes it possible to display the sustainability (or not) of an object. Moreover, sustainability economically justifies local manufacturing in the midst of the globalized economy; that is to say the strategic need for impeccable sorting and packaging.
To decarbonize the oversized globalized economy, we need to redeploy the local economy in a sustainable way by demonstrating that we can do things differently. But for that, we must be able to count on the availability of the materials that we agree to donate and have sorted by ourselves (our taxes) to manufacture low-carbon objects.