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Where has all the garbage gone?

A growing number of companies are responding to public concern over the environment by creating programs to recycle their products after consumers are ready to discard them. Everything from plastic-lined coffee cups to DVD players can now avoid the trash can, thanks to new corporate recycling programs cropping up almost daily.

Just last week, Sleep Country Canada announced it will begin taking old mattresses back from consumers to have them recycled, a move the company says will divert 30,000 mattresses from Ontario landfills every year. At the same time, Tim Hortons unveiled new recycling bins at its Toronto restaurants for coffee cups and lids, the latter of which are not accepted in city blue boxes.

But there's just one problem. While corporate recycling programs relieve consumer guilt by reducing the amount of garbage going to landfill, they miss one of the most fundamental aspects of helping the environment: waste reduction.

Rather than encouraging consumers to rely on reusable coffee mugs or reduce their consumption of electronics, beds or other consumer products, the host of programs popping up may shift public attention away from the need to find green alternatives and reduce overall consumption, according to environmental experts.

"[Recycling programs] address the symptom, but they don't address the cause of the waste problem," said Pierre Sadik, a senior policy adviser at the David Suzuki Foundation. "Realistically, no amount of recycling is going to solve the problems that accompany a pattern of ever-increasing consumption."

While recycling a product is better than throwing it away, it still takes energy and resources to produce and subsequently recycle that item - energy that could be saved if more Canadians began consuming less.

In fact, environmental experts say, recycling programs could even promote further consumption by Canadians, who may feel reassured that any waste they produce will be recycled and have no negative impact on the environment.

"It's much more optimal to avoid the need for the waste in the first place by reducing the amount of waste you produce," said Aaron Freeman, policy director at Environmental Defence, a national advocacy group.

Although the intentions behind corporate-run product recycling are for the most part good, results are often mixed because programs are scattered across Canada and not offered by many retailers. In many cases, only some of a retailer's products may qualify for recycling, Mr. Sadik said.

But even if they are flawed, recycling projects earn points in the public's eye.

Companies that can show they are socially conscious also stand to reap benefits at the checkout. A study published last month by communications firm Cone and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business found that consumers were much more likely to purchase a product when it was associated with a particular cause.

Environmentally speaking, however, corporate recycling programs won't make much of a dent in the problem unless they encourage manufacturers to dramatically change their behaviour and produce less waste, according to environmental advocates.

"If you're recycling a disposable product where there are more environmentally sound alternatives available, you should really be looking at whether you should be making something in the first place," Mr. Freeman said. "We have to make decisions about creating less waste."

Some companies say their recycling programs constitute a fraction of overall efforts toward reducing resources used to make their products and eliminating unnecessary waste.

"We've always recycled our products," said Nick Aubry, environmental manager at Sony Canada. "Over time we've been slowly expanding our program."

Earlier this year, the company announced plans to start accepting all Sony products for recycling at depots across Canada.

At Sleep Country Canada, chief operating officer David Friesema said the company has a long-standing reputation of donating used mattresses to charity. The new recycling program is merely an extension of the company's overall environmental commitment, he said.

"It's just an evolution of what we've done, which has been a reuse program," Mr. Friesema. "We will continue to look at ways to use less and reuse as much as we possibly can."

But the challenge for companies remains finding a balance between environmentally friendly and financially feasible, according to June Cotte, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Western Ontario in London.

In many ways, it's counterintuitive for profit-motivated businesses to convince customers they should consume less, Ms. Cotte said. And in a competitive marketplace, few companies would want to be the first to come up with radical environmental solutions, such as phasing out disposable coffee cups.

With companies fearful of losing profit, and customers resistant to changes that may affect the convenience factor of their lives, the move toward waste reduction may boil down to a waiting game.

"While there are hard-core, very sustainable consumers that are socially conscious in their purchasing, lots and lots of consumers would like to feel that they're doing something without drastically changing their behaviour," Ms. Cotte said. "I think the attitudes have shifted ahead of the behaviour."