OTTAWA - Ontario consumers had greater access to recycling programs than consumers in other Canadian provinces in 1993, according to a recent study by the federal agency Statistics Canada in Ottawa. About 98 percent of Ontarians could access recycling programs, vs. 85 percent in Quebec, 89 percent in the prairie prov-inces and 46 percent in the Atlantic provinces.
Plastic, glass and metal containers accounted for 20 percent of collected waste weight. Only 11 percent of the 16 billion pounds of residential waste was recycled in 1993.
Forty-eight percent of municipalities contracted out their household waste recycling to private companies and 10 percent used municipal employees to collect recyclables. In most of the rest of the municipalities, the private sector handled recycling without local government involvement.
Union Carbide plant begins production
KANSAS CITY, MO.-Union Carbide Corp.'s Prisma manufacturing facility in Piscataway, N.J., is now a full commercial operation.
The Danbury, Conn.-based company processes mixed-color, post-consumer HDPE into colored pellets at the plant for use by companies making bottles.
The proprietary process electronically sorts by color the chips flaked from the bottles. The sorted chips are mixed and pelletized into one of six consistent colors: blue, green, gray, red, white and yellow.
The firm declined to discuss production capacity or demand for post-consumer material. Prisma pellets will be sold in shipments ranging from 1,000-pound boxes to railroad cars.
The firm made the announcement Sept. 11 at the National Recycling Coalition Congress in Kansas City, Mo.
