The Blue Box Recycling System (BBRS) is a waste management system used by municipalities to collect source separated household waste materials for the purpose of recycling.
The first full-scale community wide BBRS was implemented in 1983 by the waste management contractor for the City of Kitchener, Total Recycling Systems Ltd., a subsidiary of Laidlaw Waste Systems. The system was a part of the waste management system in the City.
Today, many municipalities operate Blue Box programs that accept all forms of paper materials, most plastic packaging, glass containers, aluminum cans and steel cans. For example, the City of Greater Napanee accepts:
The municipality provides the Blue Boxes to residents in areas serviced by the recycling program. This usually includes all single-family homes and townhouse units receiving garbage collection. Tenants of apartment buildings typically do not use Blue Boxes but rather deposit their household recyclable materials in larger containers located in or near the building.
An organization called Pollution Probe was formed in 1969 by students and faculty at the University of Toronto and in 1971, members published a report stressing the need for recycling. Also in 1971, the Canadian Federal Government first established a national Department of the Environment, known as Environment Canada, with Environmental protection as one of its priorities. The Ontario government followed suit with a Ministry of the Environment in 1972.
Jack McGinnis of Toronto helped form a community-based non-profit organization called "Is Five" Foundation in 1974. Named for a book of poetry by e.e. cummings, Is Five organized Canada’s first multi-material curbside pickup of recyclable material for 80,000 households of The Beaches neighbourhood of east Toronto. In 1977, Jack McGinnis and Derek Stephenson created a private consulting company, Resource Integration Systems (RIS) to advise governments in the field of recycling and waste management.
That same year, in response to the 1973 energy crisis, Rick Findlay was hired by Environment Canada’s Federal Facilities Program to develop and coordinate a resource conservation program primarily for federal government facilities in Ontario. The program was expected to improve environmental quality and reduce energy demand. The Federal Facilities Program sought advice on a recycling pilot program for Canadian Forces Base Borden and eventually made contact with RIS. RIS experimented with a variety of techniques to improve the performance recycling and they found that participation rates were significantly higher when residents could simply drop their recycling in a plastic box. Initially, the project at CFB Borden used milk crates borrowed from a local grocery store. Participation was likely encouraged by a standing order from the Base Commander to recycle.
Meanwhile, a student and a volunteer at a Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario office of Pollution Probe, Eric Hellman organized "Garbage Fest 77" in Kitchener to raise awareness about the consequences of garbage production. McGinnis was invited to speak about his experiences with the CFB Borden program. Hellman also requested a representative from Superior Sanitation (later to be Laidlaw Waste Systems Ltd), the local garbage collection contractor, and an employee named Nyle Ludolph attended Garbage Fest. After meeting McGinnis at the festival, Ludolph became an enthusiastic recycler at his own home and helped increase Laidlaw’s presence in recycling. Nyle managed "Total Recycling Systems", a subsidiary of Superior Sanitation/Laidlaw.
In 1978, Jack McGinnis and Eric Hellman and others met in the basement of the Trinity United Church on Yonge Street in Toronto and created the Recycling Council of Ontario.
In 1981, after close cooperation with Nyle Ludolph, RIS submitted a proposal to Laidlaw to collect and recycle materials at the curbside for a pilot project in Kitchener, Ontario. RIS designed the program, and Total Recycling had the responsibility to handle all operations. The Kitchener project included 1,500 households and was tested with four different approaches to recycling:
Basically, the blue box recycling system that was proposed to be included as an included “extra” to the regular waste management contract made the difference. Laidlaw was successful in getting the waste management contract for Kitchener, and the Blue Box had its launch as a commercial reality. RIS came up with the slogan “We Recycle” that was applied to every box that went out in Kitchener. Various reasons why the boxes were blue, as opposed to some other colour are bandied about in blue box mythology, but the fact is that RIS felt they looked best and were most visible, in blue. It was a colour that was also suitable in terms of withstanding damage from ultraviolet light.
The four recycling approaches were monitored by RIS for one year and the Blue Box was clearly the most effective. The “test project” continued to run however, and Laidlaw found that people who did not have the Blue Boxes were requesting them, and letters came in every day expressing their support for the program and for it to continue. The program went city-wide in 1983, with Laidlaw providing the extra investment in additional boxes and trucks and handling equipment even though it was not required by their waste management contract with the City. Participation rates ran at 85 percent and it was clear that this was a very successful program.
In 1984 the City-wide contract for Kitchener went out to public bid, as previously scheduled. City staff simply followed previous procedures – i.e., no specific requirement to offer recycling services was included in bid documents. Laidlaw chose to submit a bid that included continuation of the Blue Box service while their competitors, mainly large US-based firms, did not. One such competitor submitted a bid that was about $400,000 lower than the one from Laidlaw. The Council meeting where the decision was made was filled with local citizens, especially students, asking their City to support the Blue Box. The City did, voting to take the Blue Box bid, not the low bid.
In 1985, Laidlaw won the bid for recycling in the City of Mississauga and introduced the second commercial blue box program in Ontario in June 1986, the largest recycling effort in North America. Now, the Blue Box system and variations of it are in place in hundreds of cities around the world.