EAST CENTRAL — Starting in January, people buying batteries in the province will pay an environmental handling fee, and will be able to deposit used batteries at any SARCAN.
“That environmental handling fee goes to pay towards collections and positive recycling for batteries once their life is over,” said Sean Homenick, SARCAN’s manager of communications and culture.
“Any batteries under five kilograms can be brought into your local SARCAN. We ask that especially lithium batteries are either bagged individually, or the terminals are taped over. That just lowers the risk of a fire occurring.”
The fee is changed every year, with it currently set between one cent for a button battery to eight cents— depending on the size of the battery.
Residents aren’t required to wait in line to deposit their bags of batteries.
“Each depot is differently set up, but if you just speak to the cashier, they’ll tell the customer where they can drop off the battery waiting in line,” he said. “I don’t think Humboldt has a ton of lines right now but occasionally people are cleaning up over Christmas or New Year’s.”
Once collected by SARCAN, Homenick said the bags are consolidated at their plants in Regina and Saskatoon, before being shipped to Call2Recycle. Call2Recyle are responsible for the recycling process.
“They have sorting facilities, I think the majority of ours will go to Trail, BC, but they also might end up in Mississauga, Ontario, where they’re sorted by chemistry.”
After being sorted, they will go to battery recyclers where they may be recycled as a battery, while others will have the metal harvested for items like construction rebar.
“There is stainless steel in batteries too that can go into… purposes like stainless steel fridges, that sort of thing. It all depends on the chemistry, but basically 100 per cent of what’s collected ends up at battery recycling facilities across North America.”
Before now, batteries had to be officially disposed of in household hazardous waste collection days.
Some communities, like Carrot River’s town office, had a Call2Recycle battery recycling box available independently for residents to dispose of their batteries since. The town has stated that they will be continuing that program, which has been in operation since 2017.
“That’s kind of what happened, either in the trash or people in the know had found another Call2Recycle site,” Homenick said.
“With batteries there’s not a huge volume, there’s not a huge weight out there— but it’s some of the most important stuff to recycle at SARCAN. This is a hazardous product that we really want to divert from landfills. We don’t want this ending up in our land and leaching into our waterways.”
Alkaline batteries may be bagged as a group.
Homenick said bags to wrap batteries can be found at SARCAN if requested.
