Home › Is container recycling free?
For standard automotive containers, yes — collected at no charge, with no contract and no minimum volume. Larger containers are quoted up front.
Standard empty automotive containers are collected at no charge. There is no contract to sign, no minimum volume to hit, and no monthly fee. Collection bags are supplied at no cost as well.
The everyday containers a shop goes through — anything that held oil, coolant, lubricant or shop chemical and has been emptied.
The dividing line is container size, and it is more precise than it might seem. In British Columbia, an oil or antifreeze container means an empty container with a capacity of 50 litres or less. That covers essentially everything a shop handles day to day — 1-litre bottles, 4-litre jugs, 20-litre pails — and it is why those are collected at no charge.
Anything above that capacity is a different category of vessel. A 205-litre drum or an intermediate bulk tote is well past the line, which is why those are handled separately.
Drums, totes and oversized containers sit outside the no-charge program. They are still collected, but as a flat quoted fee. The important part is the sequence: you tell us what you have, we price it, and you agree to the number before anything is scheduled. Nothing gets added to the invoice after the fact.
Reasonable question — free collection usually means someone is paying somewhere. In this case the cost sits upstream rather than with you. An environmental handling charge is applied when lubricants and antifreeze are first sold in British Columbia, and that charge funds the recycling system that moves the empty containers afterward. You have effectively already paid for the container's disposal at the moment you bought the product.
Which means the shop that throws containers in the dumpster is not saving money. It is discarding something already paid for, and paying tipping fees on top.
A small independent shop generating a modest number of containers is not too small to be on a route. There is no volume threshold to clear before service starts, and no penalty for a light week. The collection interval simply gets set to match how quickly your containers actually accumulate.
Realistically, the cost is the few seconds it takes to drop a drained container into a supplied bag instead of a garbage bin. There is no sorting beyond that, no rinsing, and no paperwork to fill in at each collection.
Tell us what you have on site and we will confirm a collection interval — and quote anything oversized before it is scheduled.
Request a collection