Sector Compliance Branch: Inspections

Industrial, Commercial & Institutional -Recycling in Multi-unit Residential Buildings

The Sector Compliance Branch (formerly called the Environmental SWAT Team) conducted an inspection sweep of waste recycling in apartment buildings, condominiums and other multi-unit residential buildings in the Greater Toronto Area, Ottawa, Kingston and Belleville.

• Background
• The Inspections
• Inspection Results

Background

In March 1994, the Government of Ontario created four regulations to reduce the amount of waste going into Ontario landfill sites. The regulations, known as the 3Rs Regulations (reduction, reuse and recycling), introduced the following initiatives:

• municipal source separation, leaf and yard waste collection, and home composting programs (Ontario Regulation 101/94)
• IC&I waste audits, waste reduction work plans and source separation programs (Ontario Regulations 102/94 and 103/94), and
• packaging reduction work plans and audits by major packaging users (Ontario Regulation 104/94).

The 3Rs regulations only apply to solid, non-hazardous waste from residential and IC&I sources, for example, from hospitals, restaurants, large manufacturing establishments, hotels and motels, educational institutions, retail shopping complexes, office buildings, large construction projects and apartment buildings.

Regulation 103/94 focuses on owners of multi-unit residential buildings and specifies that they must provide the following source separation program to their tenants:

• Facilities for collection, handling and storage, adequate for the quantities of anticipated wastes
• Measures to ensure removal of waste
• Information to users about the recycling program
• Reasonable efforts to ensure that the material is recycled or reused.

A multi-unit residential building is subject to Regulation 103/94 if it contains six or more dwelling units and is located within a local municipality that has a population of at least 5,000.

Local municipalities are required to collect recyclable materials from buildings if the buildings are receiving garbage collection services from the municipality or a contractor operating on behalf of the municipality. If garbage service is not provided by the municipality all qualifying multi-unit buildings are still required to recycle the list of material described in the schedule.

The Sector Compliance Branch undertook inspections of multi-unit residential buildings for compliance with Ontario Regulation 103/94 in Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston and Belleville.

The Inspections

Inspections of multi-unit residences began on July 31, 2001 and continued for four weeks. Working from lists provided by the City of Toronto, the team targeted multi-unit residences in Toronto (focusing on Scarborough and North York) that were suspected to be in non-compliance. The team then expanded its inspections to the areas of Ottawa, Kingston and Belleville. In total, they conducted 102 inspections.

Inspection Results

View a summary of the results.