Market Development

The Blue Box Program Plan provides for material-specific market-development strategies as part of a separately-funded program. Through strategic market-development, we can help ensure sufficient market capacity for recovered Blue Box materials and increase the revenue received for recovered materials. The result? Greater program efficiency and lower overall program cost.  

As part of our strategy to increase diversion rates, Stewardship Ontario is focused on plastics market development. Mixed plastics and plastic film, which make up an increasing volume of Blue Box waste, are the current priority. Development of new markets is dependent on targeting each stage of the supply chain, including:

• Modifying primary processing practices or technologies to produce a constant volume of high-quality material
• Adding secondary processing capacity to transform the new streams into commodities that can be reliably substituted for virgin materials in manufacturing
• Identifying manufacturers interested in using these recycled materials.

In 2008, Stewardship Ontario’s Board of Directors responded to the urgent need for a plastics-market development strategy by levying an additional $2.4 million in steward fees to support implementation of recycling-enhancement initiatives.  

Earlier initiatives

In 2004, Stewardship Ontario initiated its first market-development program to manage coloured and mixed broken glass from Ontario’s residential Blue Box system. The goal was to reduce the costs associated with collecting the low-value material, and explore opportunities to recycle this mixed and broken glass and use it to create higher-value products. Since then, our two glass market development funds have helped create three new glass-processing facilities with a combined potential throughput of more than 150,000 tonnes of mixed broken glass annually.