Let’s set the scene.
You’ve finished painting the kids’ bedrooms, deadheading your late summer blooms, and tidying the house before the last sunny weekend of the summer ends. You enter your storage area to grab a pair of gloves, and there it is: the pile. The pile that has plagued you for weeks and contains an assortment of empty paint containers and aerosols that you’ve kept aside until you figure out what to do with them.
This is where Product Care comes in. Not only are partially full paint products recyclable in every Canadian province*, their containers are too—even when they’re empty!
*Note: If you are in Alberta, please visit ARMA’s website to learn more about their paint recycling program in Alberta. If you are in Quebec, visit EcoPeinture’s website. Product Care manages the paint recycling program for every other province in Canada. You can also find information on paint recycling in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon on their government websites.
What does this mean for trips to your local depot? Read on below!
Where can I recycle paint cans?
Product Care has over one thousand recycling locations for paint products across Canada, from private bottle depots and large recycling centres to paint retail stores. Empty paint cans should never go in your curbside recycling bin: curbside recycling programs rarely accept these containers for safety reasons, as they may have paint residue inside them.
Use our Recycling Locator tool to find a leftover paint drop-off location near you!
Why should I recycle my paint cans?
While you may only have a can or two of paint in your garage, every recycled paint can make a difference.
After you bring an empty paint can to a recycling location, it’s compressed and sent to a metal or plastic recycling facility to be repurposed into new products or used in energy recovery. This is more eco-friendly than extracting new resources from the earth, transporting them, and processing them to create these items.
To learn more about our paint recycling process—including empty containers—check out our “How is your leftover paint recycled?” blog post.
Before you visit a recycling location, check your cans!
Before you drop off your paint cans for recycling, make sure empty cans have the original, intact, readable label and are in good condition, with no large dents or cuts.
For a list of all the paint products we accept for recycling, visit our Paint page and click on your province in the right-hand menu.
Happy recycling!
