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For recycling advocates, it’s a dream, but for Alberta’s newspaper industry, it could be a nightmare. The picturesque mountain town of Banff is looking at ways newspapers can help offset the cost of handling and recycling the town’s discarded newsprint.

The town is in “very preliminary discussions” about different ways the industry could shoulder these costs, says Chad Townsend, the town’s environmental services co-ordinator. A fee for the industry is one of several options that’s been discussed, and the Recycling Council of Alberta (RCA) is keen on the idea.

“[Banff is] certainly way out there in terms of leadership in this area,” says Christina Seidel, the RCA’s executive director. “I say hats off to them, because right now they’re paying to recycle those materials.” Seidel says newsprint makes up about half of the total paper waste and recycling handled by Canadian municipalities.

While the town of Banff gets some return from recycling newsprint, the costs of baling and handling it exceed that return.

However, the two local weekly papers — the Rocky Mountain Outlook and the Banff Crag & Canyon — say it would be difficult for them to take on these costs. “The Outlook and the Crag are not rolling around in dough,” says Outlook editor Carol Picard. “I think [the town] would be doing a lot more harm than good.”

Dennis Merrill, executive director of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association, also says charging newspapers would be a bad idea. “I can assuredly say that our association would most definitely be registering an opinion in opposition to that approach,” he says, adding it would be “tough” for many weekly newspapers to pay for recycling.

The town is currently investigating how much waste each newspaper generates in Banff. Several out-of-town papers — including Fast Forward, the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun — also distribute in Banff. “[There’s] a significant amount of newspaper with the fliers inside it,” says Townsend. “It’s a big part of our waste stream.”

Townsend says he’s not aware of any municipality in Canada that directly charges newspapers for recycling costs, but adds there are alternatives to directly charging the industry. One of the options being explored is an arrangement that would compel newspapers to give the town free advertising as a way of paying for recycling costs. The provincial government of Nova Scotia has an agreement with daily newspapers in which the papers give a $10 ad credit to the government for every tonne of newsprint consumed. (If a newspaper wants to opt out of the agreement, it can, but then it has to take over recycling responsibilities from the municipality.) “That may be a possibility for us,” says Townsend.

The discussion happening in Banff is part of the global movement towards “extended producer responsibility” — a concept that shifts responsibility for waste and recycling from municipalities to producers. This concept, says Townsend, is important to the town’s “radical rethink” of its waste management, aimed at a more holistic approach. “It’s a reflection that, at some stage, this product has an end life — and who deals with it?” he says. “It usually has a cost to that end life.”

Picard wonders how out-of-town publications would pay for the recycling of their paper in Banff. “I’d like to see them stick that bill at the Globe and Mail and say, ‘OK, this is what it costs for you to have your newsprint in our recycling facility,’” she says. “Good luck with that. I just don’t think it would fly.”

Kim Oliver, the Crag’s publisher, says the possible changes are a “huge concern” for her. “We understand that it does cost to recycle our newspapers, but are they going to look at recouping from everybody else in the community, i.e. grocery stores, and all the shops that get things in boxes and everything?” she says. “Where is it going to end?”

Townsend says the town is considering applying extended producer responsibility to other items like plastics and metals. A cost-recovery plan for these products — including newsprint — could go before Banff’s town council as early as summer.

Mayor John Stutz says council will be looking at “a quiver of options.” When asked about the newspapers’ concerns, Stutz says: “We’re not there yet at all. What we’re trying to do, of course, is be a responsible municipality in a national park and look at a number of different options for a number of different waste streams.”

Typically, provincial governments handle extended producer responsibility. In Alberta, for example, the province brought in a new recycling fee for paint on April 1. This fee is passed along to the consumer by slightly boosting the price of paint.

For weekly newspapers like the Crag and Outlook, however, extra costs couldn’t be passed on since the papers are free. “It doesn’t seem to me to be particularly well thought out,” says Picard.

Seidel, however, says Banff’s strong focus on extended producer responsibility is the way of the future. “It’s just a question of when these things come down,” she says. “You’re seeing a lot more of it worldwide, too. Europe kind of led the way on this, but… Canada is actually one of the other global leaders.”

Townsend stresses that nothing has been decided yet, and council will ultimately make the decision on how the town will recover costs for newsprint and other materials. “I’m sure that every time [extended producer responsibility] was put into place — whether that be on tires, batteries, electronics — the industry wasn’t really happy about it,” he says.