Northeast of Thunder Bay, more than an hour’s drive along Highway 11, lies the municipality of Greenstone — a string of towns and townships amalgamated in 2001 that itself takes nearly two hours to cross by car. Distances add up quickly in northern Ontario, so when the local Beer Store in Geraldton announced its impending closure earlier this month, the community had an immediate problem.
“It was the only Beer Store location for two hours in either direction,” says Greenstone mayor James McPherson. “The big issue is the empties — that’s where the big fallout is going to be.”
For nearly a century, the Beer Store has, in one form or another, operated arguably the best-performing recycling program in the province of Ontario. Its deposit-return system — which sees consumers get refunds of 10 or 20 cents per container returned to the stores — boasts a return rate of nearly 80 per cent overall, and for some specific types of containers, the number is higher still: 89 per cent of glass bottles were returned in 2022, according to the most recent environmental-stewardship report on the Beer Store’s website.
The success of the deposit-return scheme, which has been expanded to include wine bottles and other alcohol-beverage containers, stands in stark contrast to the middling diversion rates achieved by the blue-box program operated by many municipalities. The city of Toronto, for example, achieved an overall diversion rate of just 53.6 per cent in residential collection, and even single-family homes (which perform better than the city’s older apartment buildings) rate only 63.9 per cent. The numbers provincewide aren’t any better overall, and a report from the province’s Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority suggests Ontario’s diversion rates have actually fallen over the past decade.
So the closure of Beer Store locations in small northern communities poses a problem that, at least in some cases, is going to fall on the property-tax bill of local homeowners.
“As a municipality, we now are going to be stuck having to pick up everyone’s empties, and it’s going to impact our landfill space. It’s going to end up in the pile at the front of everyone’s driveway on garbage day,” McPherson says. “We are in the process right now of applying for an environmental assessment for new waste management because the Geraldton landfill is full. This is absolutely the wrong time for us to have excess material going into the landfill.”
Greenstone isn’t alone: Beer Store locations in Nipigon and Cochrane are also reportedly closing in September. In at least some cases, the Beer Store’s former customers will still be able to get beer at an LCBO or a new outlet such as a corner store or gas station — but locals will have nowhere to return empties.
The consequences will be different for different towns depending, in some part, on how close they are to remaining Beer Store locations. In Nipigon, Mayor Suzanne Kukko says, the local recycling depot has a longstanding agreement to collect empties and donate them to the local minor-league hockey program, and that arrangement may allow it to continue returning empties to Thunder Bay, about an hour away.
“Bringing them to Thunder Bay is a pain, for sure,” the mayor says with a laugh. “But it’s not completely out of — it’s not like no one is going to Thunder Bay.”
For Kukko, however, the sudden closure of the Beer Store presents a different problem: the town will now have a vacant storefront in the heart of its downtown.
“Having that empty building is a big thing,” Kukko says. “Like a lot of small northern towns, we’ve got a few empty buildings, and it doesn’t look good, having something boarded up all the time.”
McPherson says that, for his residents, driving empties to another Beer Store location simply isn’t realistic. With the closure of the Nipigon location, the nearest Beer Store locations are all more than two and a half hours away, either in Thunder Bay or Marathon (each more than three hours) or in Hearst (just under three hours.) And that assumes the roads are passable, something that’s not guaranteed in northern Ontario winters.
The Beer Store did not respond to a request for comment from TVO Today, and both Kukko and McPherson lament the lack of communication from the foreign-owned corporation.
“Nothing has come across my email as to what or why — it’s been very silent,” McPherson say. “It’s not what you expect as good customer relations, but they don’t have to worry about customer relations anymore, I guess.”
What to do with the Beer Store’s deposit-return program is not a new problem. When the Ford government announced the availability of beer and wine in more retail stores last year, it included an expectation that new large-format grocery stores would be required to accept returned empties in order to take part. The problem: grocers don’t want to take on the responsibility for empties, to the extent that only 4 per cent of grocery stores had applied for new licences as of July, according to the Toronto Star. Large-format grocers will eventually be required to accept empties — but only after 2026.
The government has also opted not to implement a mandatory provincewide deposit-return program for all beverage containers, after protests from large retailers.
“As we have previously said, should producers and retailers wish to work collaboratively to implement a system for non-alcoholic beverages that is both cost effective and increases recycling rates, we would welcome that. We are simply not making the program mandatory,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks told TVO Today in an emailed statement.
“The Beer Store will continue to run the effective and efficient provincewide recycling program for alcoholic beverage containers until at least 2031 as part of a transition period in the new marketplace.”
McPherson, for his part, says that, in some ways, the Beer Store leaving the community is just the latest example of an old economic story in northern Ontario.
“Anyone of us in this area who’ve been in the forest industry understand this totally,” he says. “Economic decisions get made, and it’s unfortunate for us.”
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