RCBC’s Awards are presented annually for:

Innovation – An organization that achieves an outstanding technical accomplishment in design or development of a product or process that improves its sustainability or advances zero waste practices.

Non-Profit Sector – An organization or individual that demonstrates excellence and leadership in environmental protection and stewardship.

Private Sector – A business with outstanding initiatives to preserve and protect our environment.

Public Sector – A government official or publicly funded organization that demonstrates excellence and leadership in environmental protection and stewardship.

Youth – A young person who demonstrates outstanding commitment and leadership in environmental stewardship.

The Brock Macdonald Award for Excellence is awarded periodically to recognize outstanding contributions in the areas of environmental education, communication, and outreach.

2025 Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 RCBC Environmental Awards! We are proud to recognize their contributions towards the protection and preservation of BC’s environment.

Richmond Steel Recycling

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Private Sector

2025

Richmond Steel recycling is an industrial facility that collects, sorts, processes, and repurposes metal waste-including ferrous and non-ferrous metals-into reusable raw materials, reducing the demand for virgin metal extraction and associated environmental impacts. They have gone above and beyond in ensuring best practices in solid and hazardous waste management, with an in-house environmental team, a comprehensive Environmental Management Plan, and are the only metal recycling facility in the region that discharges treated stormwater under an authorized permit. The company maintains active collaboration with multiple regulatory bodies, and is committed to the proper handling and disposal of hazardous materials commonly encountered in its operations, including waste oil, antifreeze, lead-acid. Their commitment to operational accountability, pollution prevention, and improving systems for the responsible handling of all materials on site demonstrates ongoing excellence in environmental stewardship.

Ann Scholten

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Public Sector

2025

Ann has been a dedicated member of Queen of Angels School for 23 years, where she has consistently encouraged and successfully implemented a 3R program from the very beginning. Ann helps reduce the school’s consumption of single-use plastics by encouraging students to bring reusable lunch kit containers and individual water bottles to school. Her impact is visible – each room in the school used to have large garbage cans, but now the garbage receptacle is the smallest of all the containers. She also leads discussions during assemblies on reducing waste and reusing materials, encouraging students to adopt these practices both at school and home. In addition to her focus on recycling, for over two decades she has led an extraordinary program in partnership with federal fisheries, hatching and releasing chum salmon with the salmon in the classroom program. By making environmental protection a key part of the school environment, Ann not only impacts the students she teaches but also their families and broader community as they take those lessons home.

Vitacore Industries

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Innovation

2025

Vitacore’s PPE recycling program began in early 2021 in response to the overwhelming rise in single-use medical waste during the pandemic. Since then, the program has expanded its initiative into a dedicated Hospital PPE Recycling Program in March 2024 and has grown well beyond just recycling masks, diverting more than 910,000 kilograms of PPE waste, including gowns, gloves, IV bags, and other healthcare plastics, from landfills. The hospital-focused program offers customized bins, detailed protocols for handling and disposing of PPE waste, and coordinated logistics tailored to each facility. To meet the increasing volume and complexity of hospital-collected materials, the company is currently developing an AI-powered vision robotic sorting system, which is designed to be faster, safer, and more accurate at sorting waste compared to the traditional manual sorting process. This automation minimizes worker contact with potentially contaminated PPE and lowers the risk of injuries from manual labour. Vitacore now operates Canada’s largest PPE recycling program. Working with the Provincial Health Services Authority, Vancouver Island Health Authority, and Fraser Health Authority, the program currently supports over 20 hospitals across British Columbia with plans to expand to at least 50 more within the following years.

Ridge Meadows Recycling Society

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Non-Profit Sector

2025

Inspired by the international Repair Cafe movement, Ridge Meadows Recycling Society launched their Maple Ridge Repair Cafes as a fully-formed, monthly event in March 2018, with partnerships with local community, business, & seniors organizations. Their Repair Cafes are pop-up events where volunteers with repair expertise help residents fix their broken items, from electrical appliances & electronics, clothing & textiles, jewelry, bicycles, and “general” stations to fix toys, woodworking, furniture, ceramics, and more! Their innovative “Tinkerbell Station” encourages kids (especially girls) to get hands on with tools, take things apart to learn how they work, and imagine and build their own creations. To date, they have had 2,819 items brought into their Repair Cafes for fixing. Maple Ridge Repair Cafes are now listed among the top 10 in the world on Repair Monitor’s dashboard – the first organization outside of the Netherlands, where the concept originated, and the leader in North America.

Rik Logtenberg

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Brock Macdonald Award

2025

Rik Logtenberg is a City Councillor for the City of Nelson. He has served on multiple climate governance bodies, including the UBCM Climate Committee and FortisBC’s Energy Conservation Advisory Group, and has been the chair of the BC Municipal Climate Leadership Council, is Chair of the Board for the Community Energy Association, is a founding board member of the Youth Climate Corps, and has co-written op-eds for publications like the Vancouver Sun on climate and community. Looking for ways to connect with other local climate leaders and use their collective power to take climate action at the local level, Rik launched Climate Caucus, a non-partisan network of over 650 current and former local elected leaders and over 1400 allies, in 2019. In 2021, Rik founded EarthNet, a platform that aims to empower individuals, communities, and organizations to catalyze climate action and ecological regeneration by facilitating the creation and launch of 10 million sustainable projects by 2030. Rik has helped drive municipal climate action plans across the country, and continues his work to support resilient communities across BC and Canada.

Past Winners

Click through to learn about the winners of RCBC Environmental Awards from past years.

Past Winners

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