The Recycling System: End Markets | Recycle BC - Making a Difference Together

Processing For Remanufacturing

After materials are sorted, and baled, they are sold to end markets as a commodity. We have a local BC end market for plastic and glass. Metal and a significant amount of the paper also stays in Canada and North America. We approve and verify each of our end markets, keeping material as local as possible whenever we can.

Changes in global markets have made it more difficult for some recycling programs to market collected material. You may have watched or read news stories that show the effects of these changes around the world, including Canada. Despite high standards for recycling markets, we have been able to ensure most plastic packaging, paper products, glass, and metal containers collected through our program are recycled due to our concentrated effort to reduce contamination.

To help explain how Recycle BC has been able to maintain our end-markets and ensure your material is being recycled and where, we’ve created a short video.

 

Recycling markets are continually changing so it’s very important that residents continue to do their part help us collect empty and clean material that can be recycled. For a full list of recyclable materials and how to recycle them, click here for our What Can I Recycle? page. You can also download our app to search materials and find your nearest depot.

Learn more about our recycling end markets.

See the other stages of the recycling process:

Learn more about Recycling Collection

Learn more about Post-Collection: Receiving, Sorting and Sale of Materials

See our blog post and animated video of the steps in the recycling process