With living room floors so recently lost under mountains of Christmas wrapping and enough cardboard, Styrofoam and plastic packaging to build any child’s dream fort, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to know that Ontarians produce more than 900 kilograms of garbage per person, every year.

What might come as a surprise — especially to the growing numbers of people who diligently fill up their blue boxes and green bins — is that we recycle only 23 per cent of the province’s waste. We have missed pretty much every target ever set, including the last provincial one to recycle 60 per cent of our waste by 2008. We’re producing more waste each year, not less.

The main culprits, though, aren’t homeowners — no matter how many new gadgets and overpackaged toys were under the tree this year — but businesses. The commercial sector is so bad at recycling that it drags down Ontario’s overall diversion numbers.

For an institution or business, it is cheaper to dump garbage in a landfill than to recycle it properly. The right sticks and carrots have never been put in place to encourage them to do the right thing instead of the cheapest thing. The same goes for product importers and manufacturers who have never been given proper incentives to accept the responsibility and costs of recycling their products or, better still, making greener ones in the first place.

It’s not that the provincial government doesn’t know what to do. It does. As Ontario’s environment commissioner, Gord Miller, reported last month, the government has produced four different reports outlining options for increasing waste diversion. Options that have been proposed, and which are used successfully in other jurisdictions, include a landfill ban on materials such as paper and electronics, a surcharge on waste sent to landfills, and making individual manufacturers responsible for the costs of recycling their products.

“We have to find a way to get to a point of action on these issues,” says Miller. He’s right, but we’re a long way off.

In 2009, the province was on the cusp of revamping Ontario’s outdated waste diversion act, including making changes so that individual manufacturers (rather than a faceless industry body) would be responsible for the costs of recycling their products and meeting provincial diversion targets. When the controversy over eco-fees being improperly applied to household hazardous waste erupted, the government shelved the changes and hasn’t moved since.

The Liberal government is now so paralyzed by fear of reviving that politically toxic controversy that it prefers to do nothing. But that can’t go on for much longer. Ontario’s existing landfills are nearing capacity and powerful NIMBY forces will prevent any new ones from being built.

Let’s hope the bulging recycling and garbage bins of the holiday season help to remind Ontario’s new environment minister, Jim Bradley, that he should make it a priority to get the government back on track to produce a waste diversion act that can actually do the job.