I’ve long been an advocate for deposit-refund programs when it comes to recycling. Through my work at my old company Thriftopia.com, I was adamant that  the eventual downfall of all current government endorsed electronic recycling initiatives in Canada would be the lack of incentives for the general public to participate.

With a 98% recycling and recovery rate spanning over 70 years, I’ve always admired the system that Brewer’s Retail (aka The Beer Store in Ontario) has put in place.  To date, less than 12% of the 21,000,000 cell phones in Canada are recycled which leads me to believe that a deposit refund system for mobile phones would improve the situation.

I’ve been told by members of both OES and WDO that deposit-refund systems would be too difficult to administer, too costly to set up, and generally unattractive to electronic manufacturers.  While all of these objections are probably true, it cannot be disputed that when there is a financial incentive in place for the public to recycle, recycling gets done by the public.

A study about Ontario’s Blue Box program authored by David McRobert of Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, October 1994 showed that where well executed and promoted, deposit refund systems generally result in more than 95% redemption.

So the question remains, why aren’t we doing something similar with cell phones and other electronics?

Perhaps I’m simple but it would seem to me that a fee of $25 at the time of purchase for a device like a TV or cell phone and then a refund of $5 to $10 when the device is returned for recycling would encourage much more recycling in this province and elsewhere.

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