Access to Carton Recycling Across Canada Reaches New Heights

The Carton Council of Canada recently completed an update of the carton recycling access rates it calculates for each province and nationally. The Council has been monitoring the proportion of Canadians that have access to food and beverage carton recycling in their communities, whether it be through blue box collection systems or depots, for over ten years. The data required for these calculations is sourced from provincial recycling agencies, producer responsibility organizations, deposit return programs and municipal websites. Our previous update had been conducted two years ago.

We were pleased to discover through this exercise that 97% of Canadians now have access to recycling for beverage cartons, up from 95% in 2021. The rate for food cartons holds steady at 90%. The growth in access to beverage carton recycling is mainly due to the increase in Ontario from 90% to 93% for both food and beverage cartons, thanks to new municipal programs coming on board. Although we also saw gains with non-beverage cartons in the Yukon and Newfoundland, in Alberta, a number of residential programs stopped taking them on, meaning that recycling for these is now available for only 57% of Albertans, versus 68% in 2021. We’ll be reaching out to these communities in the months ahead to see if there’s anything we can do to help them reintroduce these types of containers. Access in other provinces remains unchanged.

The latest rates for each province are displayed on our website at https://www.recyclecartons.ca/carton-recycling/#howarewedoing