Getting rid of single-use plastics

Environmental Defence, based in Toronto, has been running a series of Webinars this year, that they called The Recovery Series. On April 30th — The New Battle in Single-Use Plastics —this organisation presented some solutions to the problem of too much plastic in the Canadian environment. I watched in a YouTube recording of that Webinar, and took some notes on the ideas put forward.

In Canada, at present, less than 11% of plastic is recycled. Governments must ban toxic or tough-to-recycle products. By 2025 this should be a national strategy. Environmental laws should aim to reduce waste by banning all throwaway plastic, and to increase recycling. Businesses should be obliged to commit to reducing the packaging they use and individual citizens should adopt reduce-reuse-recycle habits*. Above all, we need to put a price on plastic water bottles. Coca Cola (the biggest culprit), Nestlé and Pepsi should be obliged to support a deposit-return program for the bottles they produce. Sobeys (food retailers) have banned plastic bags recently.

Canada generates 29,000 tonnes of plastic waste each year, only 9% of which is recycled! 47% of Canadian packaging consists of single-use plastic, made from fossil fuels. It seems that is worth almost $8 billion, per year, so if plastics were reused, this would be of huge economic as well as environmental worth. In any case, recycling isn’t a bad idea, since recycling initiatives create tens of thousands of new jobs.

A presenter in the Webinar, Clarissa Morawski, lives in Europe, along with about 450 million other people. Among other responsibilities, she is Managing Director of the Reloop Platform. The EU has issued a directive re. single-use plastics, so she informed us. (Frans Timmermans, a VP of the EU Commission, is the man behind Europe’s New Green Deal.) The amount of plastic going to landfills there has been capped to 10% by 2035. Cottonbud sticks, plastic cutlery, cups and plates, plastic straws, balloon sticks and the like are all banned now, along with polystyrene containers. Plastic bottles must henceforth be made of at least 30% recycled material, with their lids tethered to them, so that the lids too may be properly disposed of. Producers must pay for the collection and disposal of the packaging they generate! Europe is planning for a 90% return of these items; deposit return programs are already in operation in most European countries.

An Environmental Defence report entitled No Time To Waste contains a plan including the following recommendations for Canada:

• Ban unnecessary or hard-to-recycle plastic.
• Enable easy reuse of this material by initiating deposit-return systems.
• Support innovative, reusable products and schemes, such as coffee cups that can be used at different branches of a coffee shop chain.
• Give people incentives for bringing their own bags to the shops.
• Set aggressive targets for the recycled content of new products.

Money is needed to get the job done, but the financial burden should lie on producers rather than taxpayers! Manufacturers need to have an Extended Producer Responsibility imposed upon them and be held accountable by enforcement of the relevant laws.

* Plastic products are normally labelled: look out for the labels 3, 6, and 7. They are the “bad kinds.”