What is it about pizza boxes that they always seem to get singled out for special mention? Is it the guilt we feel at scoffing down all that cheese and pepperoni?

Green visions, aspirational goals, and political grandstanding are all very well in their place. But at some point, we have to be realistic.

Recycled content is the key component in the creation of a circular economy. It keeps raw materials flowing within the economy longer, reduces the pressure to extract more virgin materials from the earth, and delays their eventual disposal as waste.

The good news is that Ontario householders are generating less paper, plastic, glass and metal waste these days, 14% less than they were back in 2003.

An analysis of the last 10 years of data on Blue Box-type materials generated by Ontario households shows a 34% increase in the amount of plastic packaging ending up in the home. And most of it (70%) did not get sent on for recycling.

As a long-time admirer of Canadian broadcaster and author David Suzuki’s pungent style, it’s tough to have to point out three major errors in his latest opinion piece. I do so because his claim that paper does not represent a circular let alone a sustainable economy is dead wrong and based on patently false information.

The current debate over what to do about Ontario’s Blue Box frequently confuses at least four distinct but interrelated issues: waste management in general; the recycling option; the relative roles of industry and householders; and the nature of the Blue Box program itself.

The drive to get out of fossil fuels is picking up pace. And the most likely beneficiaries are wood and paper. This may come as a surprise to some people who see steep declines in newspaper consumption and a complete fall-off in letter writing (remember that?).

The Forest Stewardship Council of Canada recently had some rare words of praise for the Canadian paper packaging industry!

Don’t get me wrong. I fully support the use of more post-consumer material in packaging and products. Just not some of the BS that goes with it.

The Canadian branch of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is trying to distance itself from a promotional video that has angered its Canadian packaging customers. But the video itself, with two demonstrably false claims in it, still remains accessible to the public on FSC Canada’s website.

This is a story about what’s recyclable, what is sent for recycling, and the fees that stewards of those materials pay into Ontario’s Blue Box system. In what seems like a perversion of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, some of the worst performing materials pay among the lowest fees.

PPEC’s popular fact sheets have been revamped and updated, all 34 of them. Broken into five sections of interest, the factsheets cover a broad range of topics: from why packaging exists to where it comes from (trees); from what it’s made from to how it’s made; and to the industry’s history of reduction, re-use, and recycling.

Vancouver-based environmental group Canopy continues to make embarrassing boo-boos about paper packaging in Canada. In a blog entitled “What’s in the Box? Canopy answers its own question with a bald-faced lie, giving the impression that paper boxes are mostly made from virgin market pulp.

Report card time! We’ve graded the 22 different material categories used by Ontario’s Blue Box system according to their most recent (2018) “sent for recycling” numbers.

Most Canadians find it hard to believe that the forest industry is accountable for only 4% of Canada’s deforestation. And that Canada has one of the lowest deforestation rates in the world (0.01%).

A scientific study just published in the international peer-review journal, Food Control, poses some serious questions about the sanitation of the re-usable plastic crates (RPCs) sometimes used to distribute fresh produce to retailers.

While the collective weight of Blue Box materials generated by Ontario households has not changed much over the last 16 years (down 12%), the type of material that ends up there certainly has.

The recovery rate of Ontario’s residential Blue Box system has slipped again, to its lowest level since 2005. According to Stewardship Ontario, the 2018 recovery rate was 60.2%, just barely above the mandated provincial target.

Vancouver-based environmental group, Canopy, has launched a global campaign against paper packaging, claiming that three billion trees “disappear into packaging’’ every year leaving “a trail of deforestation, degraded forest systems, threatened species, and an increasingly volatile climate.”

There’s no question that deforestation is a serious global issue with climate change consequences. The massive fires in the Amazon and Indonesia are just the most recent examples.