How can BC’s waste management system be made more sustainable?

The top countries with the best recycling rates is South Korea, Germany, Austria and most of European countries. I do not know how much of their waste is recycled and I can’t tell because every website I visit says something different and most doesn’t say which year the data is from.

South Korea
South Korea invest 2% of their GDP into a Green Growth program, they have similar programs as Germany where people pay per volume of waste they produce. This makes local community create less waste and separate recycling from trash.

Germany
Germany has a public education initiative which informs residents how to identify what is trash, compost, or recycling, which means most of the work is done by individual households which is very similar to our system. In Germany, people are also required to pay more for products with more packaging which led to less waste.

Austria
The implementation of producer responsibilities, landfill and incineration tax, regular waste control and monitoring system and education and training programs has helped sustain the waste management in Austria. The lack of garbage incinerators helped increase recycling rates. Austrian government also committed to increasing recycling rates to 50% by 2020 which they has surpassed.

To make BC’s waste management be more sustainable, we should implement programs that helped other countries deal with their waste and improved their waste management. Programs like less garbage incinerators could reduce the amount of waste people produce. Public education to teach residents how to sort their trash, compost, and recycling which could help improve the efficiency of sorting waste after its been picked up and monitoring systems to force people to sort their trash because some people might not sort their waste properly which could contaminate the other waste. If the programs are implemented already like Recycle BC, where business owners pay a fee for the packaging they create that eventually ends up in the trash, they should higher the fee to reduce the packaging even more.

Citations
Pariona, Amber. “OECD Recycling Statistics.” WorldAtlas, 15 July 2016, www.worldatlas.com/articles/oecd-leading-countries-in-recycling.html.

Waste Recycling in Austria: Analysis of the Success. www.assises-dechets.org/IMG/pdf/ItwAustrianMinisterBerlakovich.pdf.

“Why B.C. Is Better at Recycling than Most Other Places | CBC News.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 9 Apr. 2019, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-reycling-explainer-1.5089661.