Smoke wafting from fields isn’t necessarily from burning stubble.
As the use of grain bags has increased, so has the problem of what to do with them once they are emptied. Many farmers are burning the bags because landfills won’t accept them and the companies that sold them don’t take them back.
Only one company – the Plastics Place in Alberta –accepts them for recycling. Other plastic recyclers won’t take them because they can’t be cleaned first.
Curtis McManus, policy analyst at the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, said the environment ministry has not put grain bag disposal on its priority list, despite the fact that burning releases toxins into the air.
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Tammy Myers, co-ordinator of Moose Jaw River Watershed Stewards Inc., is organizing a one-day collection pilot project for next spring to try to head off the burning.
Originally, her intent was to organize a project to collect twine but the proliferation of grain bags led her to include them as well.
The Plastics Place will pay four cents per pound for bags that are baled and ready to be loaded at a collection site, McManus said.
The only cost to producers in the pilot project will be to transport their bags to the site.
“We have funding from the EcoAction Community Funding program through Environment Canada,” Myers said.
She has also applied for funding for two more projects between April 2010 and September 2011 and hopes to use different collection sites.
Bags by the numbers
Western Canadian farmers use 12,000-16,000 grain bags per year on average
Most of the bags in Western Canada are used in Saskatchewan
Empty bags can weigh 135 to 315 kilograms, depending on size
Only one company on the Prairies recycles used grain bags
