Non-Municipal

Commercial operations are not required to take back MHSW. The Stewardship Ontario program will recover MHSW through a wide-variety of voluntary industrial, commercial, institutional and municipal collection sites for consumers to drop off MHSW such as paint, batteries, pressurized containers, pesticides, fertilizers and associated containers along with automotive products such as oil filters, oil containers and antifreeze.

In three ways:

1. By taking back used materials such as single use dry cell batteries and left over paints from your customers and employees where this is possible.
2. By hosting MHSW collection events on an occasional basis that will allow customers and employees to return these or other MHSW such as fertilizers, pesticides, solvents, used oil filters, antifreeze and their containers and to have these wastes handled safely and properly.
3. By providing information to your customers and employees on where MHSW can be taken if the first two options are not possible at your location.

Organizations in Ontario are allowed to take back batteries and paints that are destined for recycling.

Hosting a special event collection day on your site for a broader range of MHSW requires the participation of professional, licensed waste management personnel to assist with on-site handling and storage. Stewardship Ontario will be responsible for making arrangements with an appropriate service provider for these events and for the post collection costs of managing  MHSW that are received.

You will be providing an opportunity for your customers and employees to ensure that used and left over products and associated containers that they have purchased will be properly managed at the end of their useful life. If you choose to register with Stewardship Ontario as a collection site for MHSW we will include your company name and location on our interactive web site and in other program promotional materials and direct people to your location.

First, contact Steward Services at werecyclestewardshipontario [dot] ca and we will work with you to determine the most appropriate option for your organization. If your organization agrees to participate we will provide promotional material that you can use on site to encourage customer and employee participation. If you want to support the collection of MHSW on your site we will work with you to identify how best to receive and handle these wastes properly. Stewardship Ontario will then be responsible for having collected MHSW removed from your site and for having these wastes treated in an environmentally sound manner.

It is the responsibility of the individual steward (the brand owners and first importers of the designated products that are resident in Ontario) to determine how their fees will be managed internally and ultimately how the fees will be reflected in their business costs and how they will present their product prices.

Stewards have options to manage the fees: some may absorb the fees as a business expense; others may pass the cost down the line to their retail customers as part of the product price or shown separately as a ‘fee recovery.’
Retailers have choices, too, regarding how best to deal with these charges within their businesses. It means that some products may carry a fee and others may not. In other provinces with product stewardship programs where the fees are added to the cash register receipt, they have been described with terms such as “eco-fee,” “environmental handling fee” and “recycling fee.”
 
This is not a tax. All of the money goes for a program what will create opportunities for consumers to take unwanted and left-over “household hazardous or special waste” to collection locations where they will be processed for reuse, recycling, or if needed, disposed of in an environmentally appropriate manner.