Home › Where the containers go
Collected containers do not go to landfill. They move through a managed stream where the residual fluid is recovered and the plastic is reprocessed.
They are collected from the businesses that generate them, consolidated onto a truck, and delivered to a processing facility, where the residual fluid is recovered and the plastic is reprocessed. They are treated as a material stream rather than as garbage.
An individual container holds very little — a film on the inside wall, a few millilitres at most. The volume only becomes meaningful at scale. Across a full route of shops, dealerships and fleet yards, those films add up to a real quantity of oil that would otherwise go to landfill inside the plastic that held it.
That is the reason rinsing is discouraged. Residue that stays in the container stays in the stream and gets recovered. Residue washed down a drain does not.
Most automotive containers are HDPE — a durable, high-value plastic that recycles well. There is nothing wrong with the polymer itself; the only reason these containers are excluded from ordinary recycling is the fluid residue. Remove that obstacle by handling them as their own stream, and the plastic becomes usable material again rather than landfill volume.
At the processing end, containers are compressed down into small particles, washed to separate the remaining oil from the plastic, and turned into plastic resin — a clean, marketable feedstock that manufacturers buy as raw material. The containers do not become containers again in any direct sense; they become resin, and resin becomes whatever it is next moulded into.
Two useful things fall out of that. The wash step is what recovers the residual oil, which is why the residue you leave in the container is not wasted. And because the output is a saleable commodity rather than a disposal problem, the material has genuine value — the plastic stacked behind your bay is closer to raw material than to garbage.
Containers collected in British Columbia are processed at facilities within the province, so the material does not have to travel far to get there.
Ordinary recycling streams are built for clean packaging. One oily container introduces a contaminant that spreads through the bale it is in and fouls the wash water at the facility processing it, which can downgrade or reject material that was otherwise fine. A depot turning these containers away is not being unhelpful — it is protecting the load.
Practically, it means the containers stacking up behind your bay are not waste. They are material with somewhere to go, provided they get onto a collection route instead of into a dumpster. The scheduled interval exists to make sure that happens by default rather than depending on someone remembering.
Scheduled collection across the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley. Standard automotive containers are collected at no charge.
Request a collection