Podcast: How is the agriculture industry managing plastic waste?
Like other industries in Canada, in agriculture, there are some inorganic waste products that are used in the production of food. This includes containers for products, bags for grain and livestock feed, twine on bales, tubing for sap collection, and other materials. Barry Friesen is the Executive Director of Cleanfarms Canada, which provides solutions to some of these challenges and discusses how agriculture is working to improve sustainable practices on the farm.
The main points of this podcast include:
- What types of plastic farmers use that can be recycled.
- The different programs that allow farmers and ranchers to recycle their plastic.
- How Cleanfarms operates and partners with others in the agriculture industry.
- Different methods Cleanfarms is using to reduce their environmental footprint.
- What the recycled plastic is turned into, as well as the future of recycled farm plastics.
- The portion of plastics that are currently recycled from farms.
“What will happen in the future in five years and 10 years from now, it’ll look very, very different. Many companies will probably still exist, but there’ll be more because we’ll be collecting more. And ultimately the goal is a concept we call circular economy, where you make a new product out of the old product… Why not make a whole new bottle out of using ingredients from the old bottle? Why not new twine out of the old twine? A new grain bag out of the old grain bag.”
Barry Friesen
“I was surprised to see that in Canada, only 9% of our total [consumer] plastic gets recycled. So based on your numbers, the farmers are actually doing slightly better [at 10%]. Obviously, there’s room for improvement, but it’s great to hear that 80% of the containers are being recycled. On our farm, that’s one of the critical things that we like to do is recycle those.”
Clinton Monchuk

Guest: Barry Friesen
Executive Director, Cleanfarms Canada
Barry is a Professional Engineer who has been deeply involved in solid waste issues since 1995, first as a government regulator for waste, a municipal waste operator servicing a half million residents and, since inception in 2010, running Cleanfarms Canada. His range of expertise is in demand at international meetings such as the OECD Conference on Rural Development, the Conference on Canadian Stewardship, Agricultural Film Americas and other circular economy and policy conferences.
Barry currently serves as Chair of the Conference on Canadian Stewardship and as a member of the AGRI plastics working group of the European Association of Plastics Recycling and Recovery Organizations. A recipient of Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee Medal, Barry is the past chair of the Board of the Compost Council of Canada, past Board member of the Recycling Council of Ontario, past Board member of the Alberta Plastic Recycling Association, past Chair of the National Task Force on Packaging and past Board member and recent recipient of a Paul Harris award from the Etobicoke Rotary Club.

Host: Clinton Monchuk
Grain & Egg Farmer
Clinton Monchuk grew up on a mixed dairy, beef and grain family farm outside of Lanigan, Saskatchewan. He received his Bachelor’s of Science in Agriculture majoring in Agricultural Economics from the University of Saskatchewan and Masters of Business Administration in Agriculture from the University of Guelph. Clinton has enjoyed numerous roles across Canada, the United States and Mexico as a researcher, educator, manager, economist and director of trade policy.
In 2016, Clinton accepted the role of Executive Director with Farm & Food Care Saskatchewan to promote farming and ranching to consumers. Clinton understands the value of increasing public trust in agriculture and actively promotes engagement between the agriculture industry and consumers.
Clinton, Laura and their children Jackson and Katelyn, are active partners on their family grain and layer farm in Saskatchewan and cattle ranch in Oklahoma.
Podcast Transcript
Clinton Monchuk: (00:07)
From Canadian Food Focus, this is Ask A Farmer. I’m your host, Clinton Monchuk, a Saskatchewan farmer. In this podcast, we talk to food experts to answer your questions about your food.
Clinton Monchuk: (00:29)
Welcome everybody to the podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about how the agriculture industry manages our plastics. We produce many different products that obviously we consume as consumers, but we don’t always think about the primary producer and the role and some of the plastics that we would use on the farm to protect the environment and manage some of these different aspects from primary production. We use these plastics, but we also recycle them. And today we have with us Barry Friesen from Cleanfarms who is going to tell us a little bit more about this. So, Barry, how are you doing today?
Barry Friesen: (01:06)
I’m doing great, and it’s a pleasure to be here Clinton.
Clinton Monchuk: (01:09)
I really think this is an interesting conversation because a lot of consumers don’t fully understand what the industry goes through in an effort to make sure that we actually do our part on protecting the environment when it comes to plastics and some of the inorganic waste. So before we get into that, do you want to just give us, the listeners a little bit of a background, Barry?
Barry Friesen: (01:31)
So, my name is Barry Friesen. I live currently in Toronto, Ontario. Pretty much claim the country as my home, the entire country. I was born in Vancouver, moved to the East Coast, Prince Edward Island, where I partly grew up. And then when I went to university, I went to Halifax and I stayed there for 22 years and then migrated over to Ontario. I’m a professional engineer. My expertise has been in waste resource management for many, many years–really since 1995. And my first job was on a farm in Prince Edward Island where I worked on a dairy farm. Oh, wow. And so I draw a little bit of experience from there, but albeit I don’t farm, but we service farms and we offer solutions to farms across country. And we actually operate coast to coast from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland.
Clinton Monchuk: (02:22)
So one of the things that kind of intrigues me a little bit is that Cleanfarms, who does a lot of the background with recycling and some of the programs we’re going to talk about here in this podcast, it’s not technically a company. Can you explain that?
Barry Friesen: (02:38)
Technically we are a company, but what we are is, we’re a not-for-profit incorporated organization, and we don’t produce products. We classify ourselves more as a facilitator of things because we’re a not-for-profit, or we’ve been granted that status by the government. So, you know, we’re federally reincorporated so that we can allow our members who are all really producers of products can get together. They’re all fierce competitors in the marketplace, but when they come to the Cleanfarms table, they’re all equal regardless of the size, regardless of what they produce. They’re here to do a good job, the proper job of paying for the collection and recycling and/or safe disposal of products that are generated on the farm. We help facilitate it. And we as a not-for-profit, we don’t own anything other than say the computer and you know, the software that we manage our programs with. We go out to market for contractors, the competitive industry to get us the best prices and the best service possible to do the job of collecting these materials, having them recycled. And in some cases they can’t be recycled, so they are safely disposed. But the bottom line is that it’s properly managed in the most environmentally friendly way.
Clinton Monchuk: (04:00)
Your members are actually the producers of the products that are getting recycled, correct?
Barry Friesen: (04:05)
That’s correct, yes.
Clinton Monchuk: (04:07)
Yeah, so there was like a collective group that got together and realized that we need to do better for the environment, right? And trying to figure out a way to do this. So these companies have gotten together and fueled this initiative. Is that how the funding model works then, that you do this? Or is it a fee for service? Like how does that work? Just so I understand.
Barry Friesen: (04:29)
We like to consider ourselves as the blue box for the agricultural industry and our funding model is very similar to other programs, stewardship programs like us. So a lot of people are familiar with, if they buy a new tire in Canada, virtually every province has a program when you buy a tire, you pay an extra fee, and that fee goes to a company that will collect and recycle that tire at the end of its life. Same thing for computers, oil and oil containers and filters and all those sort of things. They’re very common in the consumer realm, not nearly as common in the agriculture realm. Having said that, the pesticide industry got together many, many years ago– they actually started in 1989 to fund and organize the collection and recycling of small containers. And when I say small containers, they’re typically 10 liter plastic containers. And they’ve been doing that since 1989.
Barry Friesen: (05:27)
They realized as that program grew, they added a collection called the Obsolete Pesticide Collection Program, which was collecting unwanted pesticides across the country. And they offered that program in provinces every so often. But they saw that what was happening since 1989, all these other programs are starting, and both the general public and the government wanted more. Pesticide industry came together voluntarily to start this program. But other parts of the agriculture industry, the inputs industry, and particularly the plastic products that are being used in the farms across the country, that industry realized that something else was going to happen and they were going to have to do something. And it’s no longer a “nice to have” or a voluntary program. It’s going to be a “must have”. And so that’s when Cleanfarms started. So we launched in 2010, the pesticide industry gave us…we took over the Small Container Collection program and the, what at that time was the Obsolete Pesticide Program offered every four years in every province.
Barry Friesen: (06:35)
And we took it over. And essentially our, our job was to go forth and multiply, start to bring in these other industries, make an economy of scale, make this more efficient, do a better job, and collect more materials because that’s where the world is going and what we’re seeing. If you fast-forward to today, the world as a whole has a plastic challenge, in some cases a problem. There’s very little collection of a lot of plastic products. There’s very little recycled content and a lot of plastic products, and there’s a lot of plastic litter. And so what the industry has realized is they wanted to be ready, and that’s why Cleanfarms was formed and launched in 2010. Take over of those existing programs, start to multiply and get set for these mandatory programs that are starting to pop up across the country.
Barry Friesen: (07:28)
We now have four provinces in Canada that have mandatory programs. In Saskatchewan, for instance, it’s mandatory that if you sell grain bags into that province, you have to have a program to take it back. We’re there and we’re ready. We were already operating there with our other programs. Now we could add this to our roster of programs. Manitoba has regulated not just grain bags, but all kinds of other programs, including our existing ones. Prince Edward Island now has a program for most of the agricultural plastics, and Quebec has gone one step further and virtually everything that is plastic on a farm is regulated. And we used say everything but the kitchen sink. If the kitchen sink was wrapped in plastic , that would probably be there too.
Clinton Monchuk: (08:11)
Okay, Barry, you’ve mentioned a few different things here that in terms of some of the stuff that you’d recycle, so you mentioned small containers that have pesticides in them, so herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, but then you also mentioned things like grain bags, grain or seed bags. Just for our listeners to understand, what are some of these things?
Barry Friesen: (08:33)
You know, it’s, it’s funny, Clinton, because a lot of people have seen these materials and have no idea what they are. You’ve driven in the countryside, you’ve driven past a farm, you’ve seen these things. So I’ll explain a little bit about the one thing they probably haven’t seen a lot of is a 10 liter pesticide and fertilizer container. It’s simply if you buy in bulk, you probably bought a a 10 liter container. I know I’ll shop at Costco, and if you shop at Costco, you’ve seen a 10 liter jug of something or other. It’s just typically just a plastic container. It is a little bit different for pesticides because it’s carrying a very expensive and very highly regulated product. So, you may not see any difference, but typically these are white or translucent containers. They don’t have a lot of color to them in their 10 liter container.
Barry Friesen: (09:21)
Bulk containers come in all kinds of sizes. You probably have seen them, you’ve seen what we used to call a 45 gallon drum. It’s typically all plastic these days, and goes all the way up to these cage totes. There’s these wire cages with a rigid plastic bladder that’s inside of it, and it contains the chemical inside of it. It might be pesticides, might be fertilizers. These are widely used on farms across the country. Some of these other products, a grain bag, is not really a bag. It’s really a long tube. And they come in sizes from about 200 feet long all the way up to 500 feet long. They hold grains and oil seeds. They hold a very expensive product, a 300 foot-long bag that may be 12 feet wide, and it’s not perfectly round. It’s slumped in. Might be carrying $125,000 worth of product.
Barry Friesen: (10:20)
So that bag needs to be very well designed so it doesn’t break and it lasts through the season or whenever it’s emptied. And the product inside is sent to market very similar to a grain bag, is a silage bag. That silage bag will hold hay that is put in there. It keeps the nutrients in, it starts to ferment and it maintains the nutrients. And they will cut that off, piece by piece and use the contents to feed their livestock. We talked about bale wrap and twine and or netting. A lot of farms have moved to these round bales. And so once they do their hang, they roll this hay with their machinery. And then how do they keep it together? They use either twine, which is now virtually all plastic. It’s a polypropylene plastic or netting, which is like a net that goes around it.
Barry Friesen: (11:17)
The netting is high-density polyethylene. Two different kinds of plastics look very similar, two very different functions on how twine works or netting works. And then once it’s there, some cases that’s as far as it’ll go, the farmer will take that and use that as feed. In the dairy industry, most of it, because they need high nutrients and they need to keep those nutrients in place, they will wrap those. So they’ll either wrap them individually and in Canada it’s usually white. They’ll wrap it and you’ll see these, what we call mushrooms, very large mushrooms, white mushrooms sitting on the farm around the field. Eventually the farmer will take them in and store them together. In other cases, they’ll line these, these rolls up end to end and do what they call inline baling. And they’ll have big, long tubes, like a long snake of this.
Barry Friesen: (12:09)
Typically hay will get wrapped, have five wraps around it to secure it, keep the oxygen out so that it can stay inside and ferment, keep those nutrients in which are all needed for feeding their dairy herd. Other products? Oh, we talked about other actual bags, not grain bags, but, you know, seed and pesticide bags. Typically–now I say typically because there are some different products that come in different sizes, but typically, it started with the typical 50 pound bag in metric 22.7 kilograms. And those bags are typically multi wall paper bags, sometimes lined with plastic, sometimes not depending on what the product is. That’s a big part of it. Then there’s bulk bags, and those are typically polypropylene. They’re actually a woven bag. So they make the polypropylene in strands and then weave them together to make a very, very strong bag.
Barry Friesen: (13:11)
And those will hold up to a thousand kilograms of product, depending on the size of the bag. I’d like to talk about one other product, and this is kind of an exciting one, and this is maple syrup tubing. Quebec has 95% of Canada’s market for maple syrup. It comes from maple trees. They will tap these trees, thousands and thousands of trees, thousands of taps, and there’s tubes that come in. And these tubes last about 15 years, then they come out of service. And this is one of the exciting new programs that we’re going to be operating here in Quebec, is that for maple syrup tubing. And they have two types of plastics. One is the tube itself and the other is the fitting. Two different types of plastics. We’ll be collecting those, sending them for recycling. There’s other types of plastics in the horticultural industry as well that we’re going to be dealing with, that we currently have only done in pilot programs. From greenhouse film to drip tape used in the horticultural industry and some other types of plastics as well. It just goes to show how wide and widespread the different types of tools and products that are available. And our job is going to be to manage these on behalf of the farmers. We want them to farm and let us take care of the rest, just prepare them in the right way and take them back to the depot and we’ll take it off their hands.
Clinton Monchuk: (14:39)
You touched on some of these programs and I can see where it might start to get a little bit confusing. So you touched on the fact that you have the small container program, right, and then the discontinued use pesticides that farmers may have that want to get rid of them. But then you mentioned there’s some of these other sideline programs and you mentioned grain bags, say in Saskatchewan and some all the way to everything in in Quebec. So how many programs are there that are kind of under your management for trying to recycle and properly dispose of?
Barry Friesen: (15:10)
Well, that’s a good question because it’s a little bit of complicated answer because it varies on the province that we’re happening. So what we have now is we have our slate of permanent programs that we operate that are voluntary in almost every province. And that includes our small container program, and we’ve also expanded to include all the way up to a thousand liter IBCs—those caged totes. They’re all part of our program. So you can take them back in all of those products to retail for a collection in most provinces, eight of the ten provinces, and that is Alberta to Nova Scotia. We haven’t launched yet in BC and Newfoundland, but these are for seed and pesticide bags, small containers, bulk containers, seed and pesticide bags can be taken back to agriculture retailers and we’ll take them off their hands and for recycling and or safe disposal.
Barry Friesen: (16:04)
Fourth program is our, it’s no longer the ‘Obsolete Pesticide Program’, it’s the Unwanted Pesticides and Animal Health Medication Program that is offered in every province, including BC and Newfoundland and Labrador every three years in every province. The three year cycle is something that farmers like. It’s a very expensive program to run and people don’t necessarily have unwanted pesticides in animal health every year, right? So those are offered almost in every region. And then comes the regulations . So in Saskatchewan, it’s mandatory on the grain bag program; Manitoba, it’s a host of different products; PEI and Quebec. And then on top of that, we’re now operating some pilot programs in various areas, getting ready for this mandatory requirement. If people think that “okay, I’m tired of government regulation” and and whatnot, the reality is we need a level playing field and sometimes there’s no replacement for good regulation.
Barry Friesen: (17:07)
And I say, good, because it needs to be properly well-thought out and not have an overreach. Right? The key here is farmers want to farm. They want to produce the product, they want to produce food for their customers. They don’t want to produce waste plastics. So we’re there to solve that issue for them so that they don’t have to think about it. All they have to do is once they have these waste products, prepare them in the proper way and take it back. Or, or in some cases we’ll actually pick up on the farm. Most of the time they have to go to a depot for it. So the key here is that we’re offering a solution to farmers, an environmentally friendly solution that they should take advantage of because it’s included in the cost of their product or in some cases, a fee at retail.
Clinton Monchuk: (17:54)
You touched on two different things here and one was the recycling side and the other was the safe disposal because you’re right, there are some things that, you know, farmers or ranchers might have had on their hands. And you mentioned the medications that might be on an animal agriculture farm that they haven’t used for a long time. And so what is that program and, and just how does that work to safely dispose of that?
Barry Friesen: (18:20)
Well, that program is relatively simple. When we operate a, a collection depot, these materials either leftover pesticides or animal health products, once they become waste, they get classified as a hazardous material and a hazardous waste material. And they have to be operated because it’s little bits of chemicals and medications. You bring them separately in their original packaging. We’ll take them off the farmer’s hands and because it’s so many different things, not technically feasible to recycle these materials into new products, because a lot of them are very old. So the key is we find places to destroy them through high temperature incineration. And that’s the key here is that they are properly managed at the end of life. Because they’re classified as hazardous, they can be hazardous material and they have to be safely handled and safely destroyed and they’re not safe sitting in a shed in a farm in a deteriorating container. So we ask farmers to bring it in, we’ll take it off your hands. The beauty? Free of charge to the farmer. We’re collecting those [medications], you know, some of the manufacturers no longer exist for those products, but we’ll take them off their hands. And that’s why the industry is so keen about this program. We want to make sure that it’s safe and reliable and that we get rid of these so they, they don’t exist anymore.
Clinton Monchuk: (19:47)
There’s a program that’s out there in terms of unwanted medications [for people] as well. Right? Where you can take them back to your pharmacist or your doctor’s office, wherever it happens to be. And I think it’s a great program for farmers to have, or consumers in terms of medication to make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Right? You just want it to be disposed of properly.
Barry Friesen: (20:11)
And at the end of the day, sometimes we end up in the same disposal lots as as they, because they’re also collecting these old materials that are hazardous waste as well.
Clinton Monchuk: (20:20)
Which makes sense. Right. So switching back over to the recycled side of things, where are the recycling markets for this? I know there’s a depot that’s close to our farm, but I have no idea where it goes from there. So where’s that next process?
Barry Friesen: (20:38)
It all depends on what the product is and what what we’re collecting. And I can tell you right now as we speak, recycling is in a huge flux. It’s changing and growing, and we don’t have nearly enough depots for them to take it. But, if I start with our container program for pesticides and fertilizers, those, there’s a couple of different places where they go. We’ve got three main recyclers. One is Curtis Construction, and they’re located in Nacu, Saskatchewan. And most of the small containers from Alberta and Saskatchewan end up there. What they do is they’ll shred and do a sort of a first wash or cleaning of these, that plastic, and now the plastic is consolidated and we can fully load 53 foot trailers and send them to markets. Most of that material goes into drain tile, usually used on the farm.
Barry Friesen: (21:34)
So farm drainage, drainage tile in Manitoba. Our current contractor is Miller Environmental in St. John Baptist in Manitoba, south of Winnipeg. The containers end up there. We also have our bulk containers that are collected, and there’s several contractors we have across the prairies that will collect and recycle those materials, and they do the same thing. They clean it out. These are not Kool-Aid containers, so we have to have special handling and requirements and special disposal for any liquid waste that’s coming out there or during the washing process. So that material, all of that plastic ends up into farm drainage tile in the east, in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. We have several contractors that run it. Most of it ends up in one location in Quebec where they again do much of the same thing.
Clinton Monchuk: (22:27)
Does any of this recycling plastic actually get made into some of the same plastics that farmers would then use again in the future?
Barry Friesen: (22:37)
Ultimately, we want a new container made from an old container. We’ve done a considerable amount of work to remove the chemical and the odor from this plastic, pelletize it, and make a brand new container out of it. And that’s where most of the world is going. And we’re hoping to see this happen in Canada and the United States very soon. So these containers will have recycled content in them in the future. Now those are for the rigid containers. Now we get into all the other plastics. The grain bags and there’s several options for them. There’s a company, Poly Ag Recycling in Bashaw, Alberta that takes most of the grain bags from the prairies right now. There’s Merlin Plastics that also has a partnership with a Hutterite colony that does grain bags in Alberta. And some of it actually ends up over into Vancouver, where they also have a very large facility for recycling. Those are some of the film products. If we come closer to the east, there’s both Ontario and Quebec. There’s EFS Plastics that has a plant in Listowel, Ontario. And there’s a plant which is currently undergoing renovations in Lachute, Quebec that it also does film.
Barry Friesen: (23:51)
Now I’ve mentioned a few of them and that’s almost all of it here today that are able to manage our plastic. I should say that we collect twine, which is a polypropylene product. One of the challenges is not all plastic is the same, so you have to keep these materials separate that goes stateside into the US where there’s a couple of contractors. There’s none in Canada currently able to manage the twine. What will happen in the future in five years and 10 years from now, it’ll look very, very different. The companies I’ve mentioned will probably still be existing, but there’ll be more because we’ll be collecting more. And ultimately the goal is a concept we call circular economy, where you make a new product out of the old product, and that’s where we’re going with our bottle to bottle recycling. Why not make a whole new bottle out of using ingredients from the old bottle? Why not new twine out of the old twine? That new grain bag out of the old grain bag.
Clinton Monchuk: (24:53)
This sounds like a very successful program. You mentioned that it’s been going on since 2010. How much is actually being diverted from the landfills in this effort and and what portion of the plastics that we’re currently using kind of make their way into this recycling program?
Barry Friesen: (25:11)
Well, I’ll start with how much is being generated in Canada. And our estimates show that there’s about 62,000 tons metric tons of plastics used in agriculture today, annually. Now what does 62,000 tons looks like? If you fully loaded 53 foot trailers, that will be 2,800 trailers, annually. That’s a lot of plastic. Park them, end end-to-end, it’s several dozen kilometers of trucks. That’s a long convoy. And so that’s a lot of plastic. We are currently collecting the equivalent of about 10% of that through our programming. So the combination of our voluntary programs, which have very good recovery rates and the permanent programs, which are all the up and coming, but that still leaves 90% left to get. Ultimately, I talk to our members and I tell the industry that be prepared for all of it. Get ahead of it before it gets you.
Barry Friesen: (26:16)
The other thing that I’ve got to say is that if a certain plastic product becomes a problem, you know, it’s best to get ahead of it. Solve the issue before somebody comes out and bans it. There’s a lot of call for that. So, it’s really, giving you the perspective: 62,000 tons, and that may be a low estimate on how much is really out there. The key is that we’re collecting 10% of it, but we want to collect a lot more. And it can be done. I should also mention the fact that of the programs we operate, we’ve got very high collection rates. So our small container program is almost 80%. We’re collecting almost 80% of all those small containers out there. And that’s attributed really to the farmers themselves. They’ve taken upon themselves that, look, it’s the right thing to do, let’s take them back to the depot. It’s free of charge for us to do it. I get a free bag to put it in. Why not?
Clinton Monchuk: (27:19)
I did a little research just in terms of what Canadians on the consumer side do for recycling, and I know in our own household we have the blue bins and similar to you in Ontario, and we do a lot of recycling, but I was surprised to see that in Canada, only 9% of our total plastic gets recycled. So based on your numbers, the farmers are actually doing slightly better. And obviously, you know, there’s room for improvement. I like hearing that the number of 80% of the containers being recycled, because I just think on, on our farm, that’s one of the critical things that we like to do is recycle those. What’s some of the feedback that you’re hearing from those that are, whether it’s farmers or ranchers about the programs that you have? Is it generally good or are you seeing excitement for new programs coming down the pike? What’s the general take on things?
Barry Friesen: (28:14)
What are the farmers saying? They’re looking for solutions? Again, I go back to the fact that the farmers, they want to farm. They don’t want…They’re not in the recycling business. They just want to do the right thing. They want these plastics to be collected, they want them properly recycled. We’ve heard way too many horror stories or about, you know, I followed a recycling truck and it went straight to the landfill. Saskatchewan transitioned back in the early 2000s from municipal collections to retail collections. Alberta and Manitoba are just doing that right now as we speak. This coming year will be the third year of our three year transition into collecting at retail as opposed to municipal. In those municipal sites, they’re all located at a landfill. So a farmer goes, well, I could chuck the container in here, or I could chuck it there into the landfill. No, chuck it here. And in the future, we’re going to collect it separately, and dammit, those containers are going to be cleaner and we’re going to send them for recycling. And ultimately, if the industry invests in making a new product out of the old product, they’ll want that material back.
Clinton Monchuk: (29:29)
So this leads us to our fun farm fact. And the fun farm fact of the day is actually based on Cleanfarms data. In 2022, Cleanfarms kept nearly 6 million kilograms of plastic out of landfills and the environment. So one of the questions that, you know, just thinking of how you’re operating and some of the things into the future, do you do any research on new ways to do things? Are you trying to look at ways to reduce your carbon footprint? Or are there some of those things that Cleanfarms is looking into doing more of?
Barry Friesen: (30:03)
Yes. We’ve done a lot of that. We actually we have a program here. We now have about 20 staff. We’re located from Lethbridge, Alberta to Victoriaville, Quebec. And we actually monitor what we do as a company, but we also monitor individual folks. So we’re, we’re actually collecting data on, a lot of people work from home, so their carbon footprint. Working from home is fairly low, but if they travel for work, we monitor how much they do via taxi, via their own vehicle, how many carbon emissions they put from their work. Why are we collecting that data? It’s really to try and do a full tally of what our carbon footprint is as as a company. We’re looking for ways to reduce that, you know, both individually, if we don’t have to travel or, you know, I’m fortunate, I walk to work most days.
Barry Friesen: (30:57)
We recycle in our office. You know, our bigger footprint is really what we facilitate our operations as being. And, we’re doing things like, for instance, on our small container program, our contractor in Saskatchewan that does both Alberta and Saskatchewan, now has trucks on the road that compact the material. So rather than picking up these containers and shipping air, they load it out by volume, not by weight. They could put a whole lot more weight on the truck, but it’s fully loaded by volume. But if they could compact these containers, and it’s not easy to do because it’s very large containers, they require, require a lot of effort to be able to compact them. But they’ve designed a machine that can do four times [the volume], so they’ll have four times less trucking of this material back to their central location where they’ll be processing the plastic. And we’re hoping to do that across the country. So more compaction, doing everything we can to reduce that environmental footprint. And ultimately when you do that, you start to reduce costs too. So I’ve got happy members, they have to pay a little bit less and happy farmers because ultimately no matter what you do, whether it’s a fiat retail or included in the cost of the product, we know that the farmer is paying for this. So it’s really important that we do it as efficiently as possible.
Clinton Monchuk: (32:19)
But it only makes sense, right? Even on the farm, when we’re done with our own containers, you want to kind of compress them as tight as you can because I know I’ve put them into those large bags, right? And take them to the depot. So it does make sense that you’re trying to make things as efficiently as possible to reduce some of that cost and make sure that, like you said, that as you go through the cycle and the chain, you know, that will save money elsewhere. And it is better for the environment as well. So it’s, it’s great to hear.
Barry Friesen: (32:50)
Yeah. And you know, we find every time we do something like this, look at efficiencies and the ways that we can do it, we end up with savings. At the same time we’re trying to do more. We want to collect more and more. And so 10% is great, you know, 80% recovery rate is great, but why not a hundred?
Clinton Monchuk: (33:09)
Awesome. Well, I want to say thank you very much for taking the time to be on the podcast, Barry. It was great chatting about this program and listening to some of the great things that the agriculture industry is doing and kind of looking into the future with some of the expectations for what we can do more as we move forward too. So thank you very much for your time. I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to our Ask A Farmer podcast. We at Canadian Food Focus value the input from our listeners and ask that you share this podcast with your friends and family. Remember, this is a two-way street, so we seek your input for future segments that are of interest to you about food and farming. To do this, please click on the ‘Ask Us’ icon at the top of our website, canadianfoodfocus.org. While you’re there, feel free to follow our numerous social media links and sign up for our newsletter. This segment was produced and edited by Angela Larson, research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton. Music by Andy Elson. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk. And from all of us here at Canadian Food Focus, we wish you good health and great eats.
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