This contest is over.

Teachers—show us how your classroom reuses, reduces, and recycles to be entered to win a cash prize.

What is the Remarkable Recycler Contest?

We’ve teamed up with Bell Media to encourage teachers and students to practice and promote waste reduction. Enter your class for a chance to be selected as our Remarkable Recyclers and win a cash prize for your class. There will be new winners each week, and some winners will be featured on CTV Morning Live or Bell Media’s Winnipeg and Brandon radio stations (see below)!

Enter to be a Remarkable Recycler.

Submit a photo showing how your class makes an effort to recycle (students do not need to be in the photo). Some examples are:

• A recycling corner with educational posters and guides.
• A class project focused on recycling and waste reduction. Check out our lesson plans for ideas.
• Anything your class does that encourages or helps students recycle!

The contest is open to all Manitoba teachers from kindergarten to Grade 12. We recommend students and parents tell their teachers to enter!

Teachers can enter easily online through one of our partners’ websites:

• CTV Morning Live
• 103.1 Virgin Radio Winnipeg
• Bounce 96.1 & Pure Country 101.1 Brandon

Share this contest with anyone who you think is making a difference. We can’t wait to see all the remarkable ways they recycle!

Are you unknowingly contaminating your recycling?

It’s your birthday! You pull a shirt out of the gift bag your aunt and uncle gave you. Trying your best to pretend you love it, you toss the bag aside. Your aunt stops you and says there’s something else in the bag. You look back inside. Hidden at the bottom is a $100 gift card—a gift card you came close to losing out on…

This is what can happen to materials in your blue bin when you put them inside other recyclables (also known as nesting). The difference is your aunt was there to let you know about the gift card. There’s no one to tell the machines and workers who sort your recycling there’s a soda can hidden at the bottom of a cereal box.

Nesting recyclables is recycling contamination.

Nesting may seem like a harmless way to save space in your blue bin, but it’s a form of contamination. Even if all the nested materials are accepted for recycling, the different materials can end up getting baled together. This is because most recycling is sorted by automated machinery. Magnets pull metal food cans and lids, and optical sorters use lights and sensors to identify and separate plastics. The sensors can’t detect when there are other materials inside containers or boxes.

Recycling processors have staff who sort nested materials when they see them, but some get missed. Winnipeg’s residential recycling program collected an average of 210.4 tonnes of materials per day last year. It’s impossible to catch everything that doesn’t belong, and some bales get contaminated—but that doesn’t necessarily mean the bales don’t get recycled.

What happens to contaminated recycling?

In most cases, contaminated bales still get recycled. So, what’s wrong if they’re contaminated with other materials? Let’s think back to the soda can in a cereal box example.

When the bale of boxboard gets to a paper mill, the soda can and any other non-paper materials in the bale get thrown out.

Not only does the soda can not get recycled, but it also wastes energy, money, and time by going through the collection, sorting, and shipping processes just to end up in the garbage.

What if materials nest themselves?

Let’s say you do your best and put your recyclables into your blue bin individually. There’s a chance that gravity and movement will nest some materials on the way to a recycling facility. How can you prevent this from happening?

An empty, collapsed box can’t nest anything. Neither can a plastic tub with a lid on.

However sometimes things just don’t have a lid. What now? The best thing to do is avoid overfilling your bin. All materials should be loose in the blue bin.

How to save space in your blue bin.

Too much takeout? Too many deliveries? Too many bulk store visits? Sometimes it feels like the blue bin is filling faster and faster. Here are some tips to get more space without nesting materials:

• Try to reduce the amount of packaging you go through. Some containers are unavoidable (e.g., food, especially for large families), but if your bin is filling quickly, consider buying items where the packaging can collapse (more boxes, less plastic).
• Use reusable containers: Instead of buying single-serving snacks or drinks, use reusable containers and refillable water bottles.
• Reduce junk mail: Did you know you can request direct mail to avoid your mailbox? You can unsubscribe from junk mail! Check how on Canada Post website.
• Collapse cardboard and boxes; no need to remove the tape.
• Crush beverage cans by hand. Crushing cans by hand is fine, but using can-crushers can increase the chance of cans falling out of bales.
• Crush plastic bottles: Squeeze or crush plastic bottles to minimize their size. Make sure to put the cap on so they don’t get lost during the sorting process.
• Empty and rinse containers: You don’t need to scrub them spotless, but try to remove any remaining food, liquid, or other substances. Put the lids back on all containers (except for glass containers with metal lids). Having lids on will prevent smaller objects from getting inside.
• Only put accepted items in the blue bin. Your recycling could be filling fast because you’re wish-cycling – when you have an item that isn’t accepted, but you’re not sure, so you put it in your blue bin and hope it gets recycled. The intentions behind wish-cycling are good, but it leads to contamination and is counterproductive. The collection, sorting, and transporting of contamination from the recycling facility to the landfill leads to more emissions than if you had disposed of it properly.

In recent years, you may have heard that only nine percent of plastic gets recycled. Wide misrepresentation of this statistic, among other reasons, has led many people to question whether the plastics they put in their blue bins are getting recycled. Some have even stopped recycling as a result, believing their recyclables (and their efforts) are going to waste.

The reality is, nearly all recyclable plastic collected in Manitoba is recycled. Let’s look at what the 9 percent statistic really means, how much plastic Manitobans are recycling, and why plastic in the recycling stream occasionally can’t be recycled.

Is it true that nine percent of plastic is recycled?

In 2017, a study found that nine percent of plastic produced globally has been recycled. It gained a lot of media coverage and left many with a misunderstanding of what it means.

The statistic refers to all plastic ever made—recyclable and non-recyclable. Most plastics aren’t accepted for residential recycling due to the lack of end-markets or because they’re not recyclable. Although nine percent is a low number, it represents millions of tonnes of plastic annually that are kept out of landfills and environments across the world. As technology, public policy, and education improve, so will these numbers.

The next phase of Canada’s federal ban on several single-use plastics comes into effect in December 2023. Retailers and restaurants will no longer be able to offer plastic straws, food containers, stir sticks, and other single-use plastic items. The government estimates the ban will reduce Canada’s total annual plastic waste by about three percent. Other environmental groups estimate about a five percent reduction.

For now, the best way to eliminate plastic waste is to reduce consumption or reuse/repurpose items. But when that’s not possible, recycling accepted materials will keep them out of landfills.

What happens to my recycling in Manitoba?

After being sorted, recyclables are compacted into bales before being transported to end markets.

Any accepted materials collected from your blue bin will get recycled unless they’re contaminated. Recycling contamination can occur in many forms. Thankfully plastic is much harder to contaminate than other materials. There are three main causes of plastic contamination:

• When containers contain excessive amounts of food or liquid.
• When recyclables are placed in opaque plastic bags or nested together.
• When unaccepted plastics are placed in the blue bin.

In Manitoba, there’s a 10-15% contamination rate in residential recycling. This means that 85-90% of materials collected are recycled. To avoid contaminating your recycling, it’s crucial to follow recycling guidelines in your area.

Like any other accepted material, once plastics have been sorted and baled, they’re shipped to an end market. MMSM monitors where communities are sending their recycling. They must ensure recyclables go to an acceptable end market to receive funding from MMSM—burning or sending materials to landfill is unacceptable. Recycling from Manitoba is shipped to end markets in Ontario, the U.S. and sometimes exported overseas depending on market conditions. Where they get sent depends on market conditions and can change daily.

The plastic collected from blue bins will get recycled, but we can only recycle as much as we collect.

How much recyclable plastic is recovered in Manitoba?

MMSM tracks recovery rates for all accepted materials in Manitoba each year. In 2020, Manitobans recycled 10,878 of the 23,692 tonnes of plastic packaging that entered the province. That’s a recovery rate of 45.9 percent—nearly double what it was 10 years ago at 23.3%.

While there have been steady increases in recovery rates, there’s still lots of room to improve. Keep a recycling bin close to your garbage can, and if you’re unsure whether you can recycle something, look it up in the Recyclepedia. You can also view or print a recycling guide with common materials if you scroll past the Recyclepedia search tool.

Please recycle whenever you have the opportunity and encourage others. You can rest assured knowing that the items you roll out to the curb each week are being recycled.