Clear garbage bag mandate in St. John's aims to tackle low recycling rates, city says

Household recycling is now mandatory in St. John's, city officials say, as a new clear bag mandate came into effect January 1.

The initiative requires households to use clear, colourless bags for garbage, and no more than one opaque, or "privacy," bag per collection day.

Public works Coun. Sandy Hickman says the mandate is needed to divert recyclables from the city's Robin Hood Bay landfill.

"A lot of people have been recycling, but not all of them have been recycling everything that they could," Hickman said. "We're just trying to change the habit."

By helping city workers identify the contents of garbage bags, the clear bag mandate discourages households from throwing recyclable materials out with the trash. 

Hickman said, in St. John's, the average garbage bag contains about 50 per cent recyclable materials, including hazardous materials like paint, which contaminate landfills and pose a safety risk to city staff.

Hickman said while penalties will eventually be imposed for those who don't comply, "some leeway" will be given at first to allow households to adjust.

"We won't be coming down hard on people that don't immediately use them," he said. 

Clear bag mandates have been in place in other Canadian jurisdictions for years. In 2017, CBC reported that Halifax saw a 24 per cent drop in waste volumes after switching to clear bags two years earlier.

Central Waste Management, which covers much of central Newfoundland, also mandated clear garbage bags in 2016.

Chief administrative officer Ed Evans said having one in the capital region is a "major step" toward achieving the goals outlined in the provincial solid-waste management strategy, which include reducing solid waste by 50 per cent by 2025 from 2002 levels.

"It will significantly increase the amount of material that will end up going through a recycling process," he said. "We hope that the rest of the Avalon Peninsula will follow suit."

Hickman said the decision to implement a clear bag policy was preceded by years of auditing household garbage to assess how much recycling was being wasted.

"We were actually taking samples over several years and just looking at people's waste in their garbage," he said.