Responsible product use and disposal is up to you

(July 22) - All sales are final. That's the way it is with paint. It doesn't matter where you buy it. If you get too much, and have half a gallon of Yew Green left over, don't try returning it. No one who sells it wants it back.

Well over 10 per cent of all paint sold never touches a brush or a roller or a wall. It stays in the can on basement floors and garage shelves all over Guelph, indeed throughout Ontario and across Canada. It is, by far, the largest component of the household hazardous waste mountain. It makes putting out a house fire one of the most dangerous tasks undertaken by firefighters. This isn't because of the heat or the collapsing roofs. It is because of the smoke. The chemical soup of waste material stored in the home is a major cause of the workplace cancers they risk falling victim to.

You shouldn't keep it. You can't return it. You can never throw it out. So what can you do? Give it to the city. Load it into the trunk and drive it out to the Waste Resource Innovation Centre. That's the place we used to call the Wet-Dry. Still do, more often than not. Drop the paint off.

One day you'll be painting the kid's bedroom and who cares what colour it will be? It won't matter, because the little dear isn't going to like it anyway. Drive back out to Dunlop Drive and pick up some paint someone else left there. The city will charge you exactly what they paid you when you dropped off your old paint. Nothing.

This exchange program was reinstated at the beginning of the month, at about the same time as new "eco fees" started appearing on paint store sales invoices. An extra 10 cents a litre helps fund municipal recycling programs. Similar fees are charged on motor oil, solvents, antifreeze and other hazardous material.

The "eco fees" go to a group called Stewardship Ontario, which uses them to fund municipal collection depots. The paint used to be sent on a long journey, at the end of which it would be used as a fuel additive. Soon, it will go to Hotz Environmental Services in Hamilton. It will be blended and reprocessed as second grade paint.

It's not exactly extended producer responsibility (EPR), but it will do until the real thing comes along.

EPR was born in Germany about 15 years ago. At first, it required producers to take back and reuse, or recycle, the packaging in which they ship and sell their products. It has grown over the years to a requirement that manufacturers are responsible for the final disposal of the things they make. With EPR, when your Intrepid is about to give up the ghost, you don't limp it out to a scrap yard. You bring it back to Chrysler and they reuse some bits, recycle others and safely dispose of the rest.

EPR gives the research and development folk an incentive to design the product with an eye on its eventual disposition. They don't necessarily build things to last longer. In fact, they build them to last shorter. They don't want them sitting in landfills for the next 500 years. In 2006 an article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review called it "planning the funeral at the birth." An excellent definition of EPR.

If we had this in Ontario, the companies that make the paint would have to take it back for safe disposal. We don't have it, and they don't have to do it. What we have instead could be called Extended Consumer Responsibility. When you buy something, you agree to be accountable for its proper use and disposal.

Think about an apple, but not the computer type. You eat an Ida Red and put the core in the compost bin. Nothing goes to waste.

It gets more complicated with more complex products, but the principles remain the same.

In a couple of weeks, on John Galt Day, the city will take many of your old electronics off your hands. They are having another Eco Day on Dunlop Drive.

Next week we'll have a look at what happens when your Wii becomes WEEE.