People across Ontario learned about changes to recycling collection first when flyers arrived in the mail in late 2025, and then early this year when thousands of blue bins didn’t get picked up. Collection has improved, but there are still some hiccups. The bigger question, though, is why did the system change in the first place?
Why is recycling changing in Toronto?
The previous Ontario Liberal government legislated that makers of packaging waste, like pop bottles, would become responsible for collecting and managing that waste. Though they haven’t been in office since 2018, the Liberals’ changes have finally come into effect as of Jan. 1, 2026.
Municipalities like Toronto used to be the ones managing packaging waste, and companies paid a portion of that cost based on how much packaging waste they put into the system.
“For many decades, the cost of recycling has gone up, and that’s largely because recycling has gotten more expensive and harder to do as we move towards more plastic packaging,” says Emily Alfred with the Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA) in an interview with Green Majority Radio (a show this author co-hosts).
That old setup and the growing costs meant there was constant contract negotiation between local governments and companies like Unilever and Coca-Cola. And the companies would constantly complain that the city’s costs were too high.
“So about 10 years ago, the province said, ‘Okay, we’re gonna switch that system. The producers are gonna pay for all the recycling,’” Alfred explains.
The company that was set up by waste producers is called Circular Materials. It is through Circular Materials that the companies that make packaging waste fulfil their responsibility to manage it.
The idea behind this is called “extended producer responsibility,” meaning the polluter should manage and pay for their waste. This kind of arrangement already exists here for items like car tires, paint, hazardous materials and more.
What can go in the recycling now?
There are significantly more items that can now go in your blue bin for recycling. This includes black plastic (e.g., food containers), ice cream tubs, frozen juice containers and hot or cold beverage containers (e.g., paper coffee cups).
As a general guideline, any packaging you buy from a store can now go in the recycling. That includes plastic bags, pizza boxes, foam packaging, toothpaste tubs and aluminum foil and aluminum trays.
Check out circularmaterials.ca for the full list. For making the materials easier to recycle and safer for workers, the packaging should be as clean, empty and free of residues as possible. A quick rinse can help.
Alcohol bottles and cans are technically not the responsibility of Circular Materials, but there’s a good chance they’ll get recycled if you put them in the blue bin. That’s because glass and especially aluminum are high-value materials.
Officially, booze empties are supposed to go to Beer Store locations, even as those locations are quickly closing down. Grocery stores were supposed to take empties but they really don’t want to and the Ford government has been letting the big grocers get their way.
Alfred says that a solution to this confusion would be “to put a deposit on all beverage containers,” not just alcohol, “and ensure there are return locations across the province. Deposits lead to higher recycling rates and better, cleaner recycling than the blue box ever will.”
Is it really being recycled? What are the problems with the system?
The short answer is: maybe not.
The longer answer is that the industry has been lobbying hard to weaken the requirements, and they’re getting their way.
In 2016, when Ontario passed the Circular Economy Act, there was talk about applying extended producer responsibility “to all packaging, to appliances, to textiles, to everything, so that basically everything that you have, all the stuff that you buy that we can … attribute and trace back to a brand owner,” Alfred at TEA explains.
“[The brands] would have to figure it out, how to dismantle it, and how to take it back and safely manage it. Now, this is where the problem starts to happen. This kind of a regulation, this kind of a principle works when you have good regulations and good standards and you actually stick to them. So when the Ford government came in, they were less interested in strict environmental standards and more interested in controlling costs for their producer lobbyists that were telling them that this is gonna cost a lot of money.”
Instead of constantly increasing the standards and applying tough penalties for non-compliance, “we’ve seen regular watering down of the targets, delays in how fast it was gonna happen and reduction or reluctance to apply penalties to any of the producers.”
Alfred gives the example of flexible packaging like snack wrappers and like Ziploc bags, which are low value and notoriously very hard to recycle.
“So producers have lobbied the province to lower their recycling target to 10 per cent. Which is ridiculous.” That means 90 per cent of that packaging ending up in the garbage is considered a success under current regulations.
In September 2025, producers successfully pushed to delay the targets by two years.
“For the first few years, they only have to make their ‘best efforts.’ They don’t actually have to meet any target at all.”
This new recycling system has the potential to bring about a change in how we think about waste, and it could hold packaging-producing companies responsible for their waste. But as we’re already seeing, it is a fragile system, and the whole thing could backfire without strong regulations.
This article appeared in the 2026 Feb/Mar issue.
