Lachine Sorting Centre, what and what not to recycle this holiday season

The holidays bring many things – food, family and gifts. And with gifts comes wrapping paper, tissue paper, boxes, and more. With the holiday season, Montreal’s Lachine Sorting Centre is looking ahead to the holiday aftermath – hoping to educate Montrealers about what and what not to recycle.

“We don’t like to see Christmas lights. These little things can get stuck in the machines, stuck the conveyors. So this is my nightmare in this moment of the year,” says the centre’s production supervisor, Mauro Pecchia.

Sorting Centre director, Maxime Moisan, acknowledges that it can be easy for the public to get confused.

“We can be mixed up because before we always talked about metal, glass and plastic. This is all recyclable normally. But if everything is mixed together [as is the case with Christmas lights] then no, it’s not,” says Moisan.

Experts say once the wrapping has been opened, the question of waste management looms. Ornaments and trees are also among those items most often disposed of incorrectly. What’s best is to contact your municipality if you have questions.

“If people put the right material in the right bin, our job is going to be faster and more efficient. But every time there is something that is not supposed to be […] in the recycling, we have an operator or a machine working to pick it out,” says Pecchia, adding “I already saw a barbecue passing through.”

“We are forecasting that during the holidays we are going to receive double the amount of material […] we are going to arrive mostly around 3000 tons per week. And this is going to last until the end of January, the time that we process it all,” Pecchia says.

Director, Moisan, feeling humbled by the site’s ability to make a difference – on an environmental level and beyond.

“People would think that our first mission is environmental. But actually our first mission is to create jobs for the kind of people that normally don’t have. People with disabilities, physical or mental disabilities, we adapt jobs here for them. So we do make a big difference,” says Moisan.