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Shortly after the city of Calgary implemented its blue bin recycling program, the National Post‘s Kevin Libin found that the program was succeeding in making people feel as though they were doing their part to help the environment, but that it actually had a negative environmental impact, as the city had doubled the number of garbage trucks — and thus the amount of CO 2 going into the atmosphere — overnight.

“Homeowners dutifully put out their glass, plastic, steel and aluminum packaging. But the only really valuable item … is the metal,” wrote Libin. “The trouble is that in the typical North American city’s solid waste stream (including trash and recyclables) aluminum and steel generally account for just 2% by weight. Glass sent to recycling facilities is heavier, making up 3% to 5% of typical city waste by weight. But although it demands more energy, there isn’t much use for it. All the glass collected this year by Calgary’s new program ended up at the East Calgary Landfill, where it is piling up for want of a buyer.”

By coming late to the government-mandated recycling game, Calgary’s city managers should have known that much of the municipal waste was unlikely to be recycled — certainly not the 80% of total waste the city had targeted. Edmonton and other cities around the country had been stockpiling recyclable material for years.

Germany had also put millions of tonnes of recyclable plastics in rural fields, which had a striking resemblance to old-fashioned garbage dumps. And as far back as the early 1990s, when municipal recycling programs were still a novel concept, research in the United States found that much of the material collected ended up sitting in special sections of municipal dumps, with governments unable to find buyers for the waste.