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Can too much recycling be bad? Giving back all your deposit-refundable cans and bottles may be good for the environment, but it turns out to be not so good for Recyc-Quebec, the province's recycling corporation. "If everybody returns every bottle for deposit, the system would go bankrupt immediately. It's already being strangled by its own success," says Qussai Samak, a former member of the BAPE commission (the provincial environmental review panel) on waste management who studied Quebec's deposit system. The system works like this: Recyc-Quebec collects all the five-cent bottle and can deposits that consumers pay at the supermarket counter. Recyc-Quebec refunds five cents for each container returned, and also pays retailers another two cents each for handling and storing the bottles. Recyc-Quebec then uses all remaining deposit money (on all the containers that are never returned) to pay for its operating costs. But at a certain cutoff point--specifically, 71 per cent of all containers--it starts to lose money. People have been returning their soft-drink containers so much recently (77 per cent in 1998) that it has eaten up the early years' accumulated surplus. Richard Boisvert, Recyc-Quebec's financial director, says that it has asked Quebec for a $27-million loan just to keep going. The deposits are its sole revenue source. To get out of its hole and have a new, permanent funding source, Boisvert wants the government to introduce a levy on new tires to finance its used tire recycling program--which was promised last year. Talks are also underway with soft-drink manufacturers to get them to assume more of the recycling costs. "There's resistance, but we're quite hopeful to get an agreement," Boisvert says. --Wayne Hiltz
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