Two more Montreal-area communities are making it easier to recycle personal protective equipment.
Authorities within the cities of Vaudreuil-Dorion and Pointe-Claire have arrange boxes at various locations where people can drop off the items. Officials in each cities say it’s about time.
“I even have noticed masks lying on the street and like the amount just went up, right,” Judith Largy-Nadeau, Vaudreuil-Dorion’s environmental advisor noted. “People using them and just disposing of them wherever they’ll. We thought this might be opportunity to send them someplace else where they might be reused as a substitute.”
In that city, only disposable masks are being collected for now whereas, in Pointe-Claire, residents can drop off masks, safety glasses and earplugs.
“When the box gets full it’s sealed and it is distributed back to the corporate to be recycled,” explained that city’s mayor John Belvedere.
Officials at that company, Recent Jersey-based TerraCycle, say the recovered items are utilized in what they call low-end industry applications. “Things like railroad ties, outdoor furniture and plastic shipping palettes,” said Dylan Layfield, TerraCycle’s senior materials solutions manager, in a Skype interview in November.
The initiatives come weeks after the borough of Saint-Laurent began collecting used PPE for recycling.
For the reason that start of the pandemic, environmentalists have been alarmed by how much PPE is being dumped in landfills and waterways.
In keeping with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, in a single yr roughly 63,000 tons of COVID-19-related PPE could find yourself as waste.
Largy-Nadeau is surprised more corporations aren’t recycling protective equipment.
“It looks like it might be possible to recycle it and I feel we must always be moving to recycling things as much as possible,” she said.
Along with recyling used items, more PPE could soon be made more environmentally friendly as well. Earlier this fall Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada issued a call for entrepreneurs to propose solutions akin to biodegradable and recyclable PPE.
“The 2 challenges combined attracted 90 proposals from small and medium-sized enterprises,” spokesperson Riyadh Nazerally said in an email to Global News. “The Government of Canada anticipates funding recipients to be chosen and awarded in the primary quarter of 2021.”
Largy-Nadeau said she welcomes all solution to not polluting the environment with PPE.
“If we are able to reuse them, recycle them as a substitute, it’s all the time option,” she stressed.
