We asked 3 companies to recycle Canadian plastic and secretly tracked it. Only 1 company recycled the material
Do you know where your recycling really goes after it’s been picked up?
After several instances of Canadian plastic waste turning up overseas in places like the Philippines and Malaysia, CBC’s Marketplace wanted to track the lifecycle of Canadian plastic.
Journalists bought bales of film plastic ready for recycling, hid trackers inside them, and then re-inserted the plastic back into the recycling stream in British Columbia — the province known for having the most efficient recycling program in Canada.
Using an alias email, Marketplace reached out and commissioned three major waste collection businesses with ties to municipal programs in B.C. to process the material. The bales were picked up by Merlin Plastics, Waste Connections of Canada, and GFL Environmental Inc.
