Waste Diversion Groups Can Sit Uncomfortably With The Competition Act

The industry funding organizations used to provide, or to fund, waste diversion can have anti-competitive effects. There is a natural tendency for large companies with market power to use that power to design waste diversion programs and organizations in their own interest and to create obstacles for their competitors. The curious mixture of public and private power that industry funding organizations enjoy can leave those competitors with few remedies, other than (perhaps) a complaint to the Competition Bureau.The anti-competitive effects of a proposed waste diversion plan were discussed in Ontario when the used oil Industry Stewardship Plan was proposed a decade ago. The plan was rejected. Here is a very interesting letter from the Competition Bureau to Waste Diversion Ontario about the anti-competitive aspects of the used oil ISP.  For example, the generators of used oil seem to have designed  the ISP to make it harder for SafetyKleen to compete with them: