durhamregion.com | This Week | Thursday, November 24, 2022 | 20 Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover Thank You for Doing Your Part! Katherine Ross, Waste Management Technician for the Region of Durham talks everything Waste. Send your waste related questions or comments to waste@durham.ca If you require this information in an accessible format, please call 1-800-372-1102 • durham.ca/waste Transition of Durham Region's Blue Box program to Extended Producer Responsibility In 2016, the Province of Ontario passed the Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act (RRCEA) as the enabling legislation for enacting Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in Ontario. On August 15, 2019, the Minister of Environment, Conservation and Parks announced that the Blue Box program will transition to full EPR. This means Durham Region will no longer be involved with collection, processing, or marketing Blue Box material. The Blue Box regulation identifies Durham Region's transition date as July 1, 2024. The regulation makes producers of designated products and packaging recycled in the Blue Box fully responsible for operating and financing the Blue Box program, including providing collection services to local communities, managing Blue Box materials, and achieving diversion targets to improve diversion, address plastic waste and recover resources for use in a circular economy. The EPR regulation for the Blue Box program (Ontario Regulation 391/21) was finalized in June 2021. The focus of the regulation is on maintaining a convenient and accessible collection system for residents. One requirement is to identify a standardized list of materials to be collected in every community in Ontario. Producers (i.e. brand-owners, importers, marketers of products in Ontario) will be responsible for managing designated materials. Producers will work with Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) to manage these materials and ensure provincially mandated obligations are met. On July 1,2024, the producers will take over Blue Box collection services in the Region. While the details of how producers will run the program are not yet known, producers must operate the program similarly to the way Durham Region operates it until all Ontario municipalities have transitioned to full EPR by the end of 2025. The regulation includes all single-family residences and multi-residential buildings, schools, not-for-profits long-term care and retirement homes and municipal public spaces/parks currently receiving municipal garbage collection as part of the initial transition. In 2026 and beyond, non-serviced multi-residential buildings, schools, long-term care and retirement homes can request to be added to the services. The goal of EPR is to encourage producers to have greater participation in recycling and the circular economy. By making them responsible for the costs of recycling, producers will have greater incentives to reduce packaging and use materials that are more readily recyclable. As you can imagine there are many moving parts associated with this change, and the program rollout is still evolving with the province and producers. The province has emphasized that the change in responsibility should not impact resident services at all during transition. This is a positive step forward, one that municipalities have been advocating for many years. Our goal is a seamless transition to EPR that does not impact our residents. As the Region learns more details and the specific impacts to residents, these details will be shared. Learn more and stay informed by visiting durham.ca/waste.