Household products giant S.C. Johnson plans to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a recycling program in Canada for plastic bags next month in conjunction with Walmart, the company's general manager for Canada Ana Dominquez told Business in Vancouver March 26.
Family-owned S.C. Johnson produces well known branded products such as Windex, Raid and Pledge although this program will target users of its Ziploc plastic baggies.
Walmart will place Ziploc-branded bins at the front of its stores and S.C. Johnson will finance signage and marketing campaigns.
"Awareness really is the biggest challenge," Dominquez told BIV after she appeared on a panel at the biannual Globe Conference taking place at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
"This is something new that we're trying to test with customers to see if it works."
Set to launch on Earth Day, April 22, the program will accept all plastic bags, including competing brands, even though the bins will be marked with Ziploc branding.
Consumers will be urged to first reuse plastic baggies and, when they are no longer usable, to wash them, dry them and bring them to Walmart.
No compensation will be given for those efforts. Different third-party companies will be contracted to collect the baggies and recycle them into a material that can be sold, Dominquez explained.
S.C. Johnson will also compensate those third-party companies to coordinate the logistics of the recycling program.
She added that she is discussing with others at S.C. Johnson the concept of having deposits on packaging.
No such program is yet in the works, however.
Fraser Institute associate director of the centre for environmental studies Joel Wood told BIV that he believes deposit systems provide an additional incentive to compel consumers to make the extra effort to recycle.
"The deposit refund system definitely provides an added incentive for people to return their products," he said. "It also provides another incentive if I decide I don't care about getting five cents and I throw my pop can away. In that case, someone else, either a scavenger or even people at a garbage depot to do additional sorting out to find cans that will provide them with money."
