As Canada celebrates Earth Day 2026, Cleanfarms is ushering in a new era as a maturing, 15-year-old organization with a growing focus on finding innovative circularity solutions in Canadian agriculture.
This evolution is the direct result of transformative work started by outgoing Executive Director Barry Friesen, who retired on April 2, 2026, after a career defined by visionary leadership. Under his guidance, Cleanfarms created a comprehensive “blue box” model for Canadian agriculture, created stewardship programs across Canada and provided operational support for provinces as they implemented extended producer responsibility policies for a variety of agricultural materials.
Cleanfarms today offers ten programs that help farmers across Canada recycle and sustainably manage agricultural plastics and products that they use on their farms. In 2025, its flagship recycling program for pesticide and fertilizer containers under 23 L—which consistently achieves an incredible recovery rate that exceeds 80%—was extended to Newfoundland. Cleanfarms continues to work with its partners to find, develop and support innovative solutions to keep used agricultural plastics moving through a closed-loop system: persuasively making the case that these outputs can be seen as a resource rather than a waste.
“Recycling in this sector is hard to do, but worth it,” says Interim Executive Director Shane Hedderson. “It happens only as a result of us making very considered decisions by forming relationships with our members and partners, and working closely with Canadian farmers. That’s why on Earth Day 2026, we celebrate the Cleanfarms way of ushering in a high-value phase of stewardship in which circularity is both operationally viable and a valued component of how the entire Canadian agricultural sector works.”
Source : Clean Farmers