Raw Materials Company Inc.

Ontario’s Fall Curbside Battery Collection Returns

October 19, 2020

The Region of Peel kicked off its curbside collection for used household batteries on Monday. Brampton, Mississauga and Caledon are three of 40 Ontario communities taking part in the fall collection to divert household batteries from landfills across the Province. 

The set out instructions may differ slightly by municipality, but the basics of the program are the same everywhere. Municipalities provide the collection in the spring and/or fall and it’s usually timed to coincide with daylight savings when fire departments remind everyone to change the batteries in smoke alarms. Some municipalities send out collection bags, while others ask residents to use their own. In either case, people round up their used batteries and place them into a bag, sealing it with the zip tab. The bag is then set out with the recycling on a day advertised by the municipality. 

Curbside collection for household batteries is only provided by some municipalities at certain times of the year. Batteries must never be placed loose inside the blue box and should not be disposed of in the trash. If curbside collection is not an option in your area, visit www.rawmaterials.com/page/locations/ to find a free recycling point near you.

After the collection, the batteries are shipped to the Raw Materials Company recycling facility in Port Colborne Ontario. The alkaline batteries recycled at the curb and across Ontario, are processed by Raw Materials Company using its patented recycling technology called the RMC 3500.  The RMC 3500 was specifically designed to reclaim the steel, nickel, zinc, manganese, and potassium from alkaline batteries. The process was independently audited by CSA Group Guideline – CSA SPE-890-15 and it achieved a recycling efficiency score of 84% and an overall diversion score of 87%. That means 84% of the materials inside a single alkaline battery are reused in applications they were originally mined for, displacing the need to mine for the equivalent amount of resources from ore, which is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions.

“1.3 million homes across Ontario now have a convenient option to recycle this common waste,” said James Ewles, President of Raw Materials Company. “Since its inception in 2012, Ontario residents have recycled more than 30 million household batteries at the curbside, putting the resources inside them back into Ontario’s circular economy.”

Raw Materials Company is an industry leading battery-recycling company. Established in 1985, RMC employs more than 60 people in the community of Port Colborne, Ontario. Raw Materials Company is a registered battery hauler and processor with the Resource Productivity & Recovery Authority (RPRA) under Ontario Regulation 30/20.