“Recycling Fee” Could Be Slapped On Future Ontario Electronic Purchases

You already pay a small fortune in tax when you buy a new computer, a huge TV set or an out-of-the-box printer. But you could soon be paying even more to get rid of them. The Ontario government is looking at implementing a tax that would be added to the purchase cost of new electronics to pay for recycling the gizmo when its life span is over.

Environment Minister Laurel Broten concedes that landfills are quickly filling up with a new kind of electronic junk – including old PC monitors, scrapped TV sets, discarded VCRs and leftover laptops. They take up a lot of room and don’t biodegrade. What to do? Look at what other provinces have done and slap a fee on the price of buying the item at checkout. When you eventually throw it out years later, the recycling costs are already paid for.

Broten has asked Waste Diversion Ontario to come up with a viable plan by next February. A tax could soon follow, although there was no timetable given. “All of us understand the costs associated to the environment with the products that we consume,” she explains. “Moving forward as a society … we are all going to have to come to grips with the environmental footprint and legacy that we leave.”

So how much more would a visit to your local electronics store run you?  If the programs already in place in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan are any indication, anywhere from $5-$45, depending on the item. 

No one knows when the levy would go into place, but they are sure of one thing. “The consumer will pay for this – the only question is whether they’ll see what they’re paying for,” advises Waste Diversion’s Gemma Zecchini.

“It costs money to do the right thing,” adds Jay Illingworth of  Electronics Product Stewardship Canada.

But some don’t expect anything but your money to be recycled. The opposition parties claim the Liberals have put forward the idea three times before but have never done anything about it.

Photo credit: David Friedman/Getty Images