GOLDSTEIN: The straw that broke the camel’s back – Banning single-use plastics in Canada means more waste

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The Trudeau government’s plan to eliminate plastic waste in Canada by 2030 is underway with the phasing out of single-use plastics.

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As of December 20, the manufacture and importation for sale in Canada of plastic checkout bags, utensils, to-go containers, stir sticks and most plastic straws (with some exemptions for soft straws) will be prohibited. The sale of these items in Canada will end one year later.

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For six-pack ring bearers, the respective deadlines are six months later.

By December 2025, all designated single-use plastics will be banned, including manufacture, import and sale for export.

The most visible change initially will be for grocery stores to end the use of plastic bags – already underway at some chains and set to happen in 2023 for others.

Many fast food outlets have already eliminated or are phasing out plastic straws, cutlery and stir sticks.

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Trudeau is delivering on a 2019 promise – a year late – that began with his verbally challenged response to a reporter who asked what his family was doing to reduce plastic use.

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Her unintentionally hilarious response was, “We recently switched to drinking bottled water from… water from, when we have bottled water, from a plastic, sorry, far from plastic to paper, like water bottles to canned drinks, sort of thing.”

(Single-use plastic water bottles are not included in the current bans.)

Meanwhile, the government’s own impact assessment says that while banning single-use plastics will remove 1.5 million tonnes of plastics from the waste stream from 2023 to 2032, it will add nearly double that amount to waste – 2.9 million tonnes – from the use of plastic substitutes such as paper, wood, molded fiber, aluminum and alternative plastics.

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Since the production costs of these alternatives are generally more expensive than those of plastic, the government estimates the cost increase for consumers at $2 billion from 2023 to 2032, or $50 per capita. Even with estimated savings of $616 million from eliminating single-use plastics, the net cost is estimated at $1.4 billion.

Although the impact assessment indicates that there will be a net environmental benefit from eliminating single-use plastics, including the reduction of 1.8 million megatonnes of greenhouse gases per year, it also indicates that some substitutes will have a greater impact on climate change, as well as negative effects on the air. and water quality.

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The government says, based on 2019 data, 15.5 billion plastic grocery bags were sold each year in Canada, 5.8 billion straws, 4.5 billion cutlery, three billion mix, 805 million to-go containers and 183 million six-pack rings.

The six categories of single-use plastics subject to the ban account for around 160,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year, or just 5% of the total amount of 3.3 million tonnes of plastic waste.

Of that, 86% ends up in landfill, 4% is burned, 9% is recycled – so much for all those years of faithful blue box recycling – and about 1%, or 29,000 tonnes, is released into the environment as form of waste. , of which 2,500 tons end up in oceans, lakes and rivers.

With only about 1% of Canada’s physical plastic waste escaping into the environment, Canada is not a major contributor to the global problem of plastic pollution in oceans, rivers and other waterways. of water in the world.

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As Kenneth Green, director of natural resource studies for the Fraser Institute, puts it:

“Canada’s contribution to global aquatic plastic pollution, when assessed in 2016, was between 0.02% and 0.03% of the global total. If market trends were to continue in the absence of ZPW2030 (zero plastic waste by 2030), the government’s regulatory impact assessment estimates that plastic waste and plastic pollution could increase (compared to 2016 levels) by about a third by 2030.

“Thus, if ZPW2030 eliminated all of the predicted increase, it would prevent a 0.02%-0.03% increase to 0.023%-0.033% of the world total, an undetectable reduction of three thousandths of one percent.”

On the other hand, Canada exported 100,000 tonnes of plastic waste to other countries in 2018 (and four million tonnes over the past three decades), ostensibly for environmentally friendly waste disposal, but in the real world, often using Third World countries as dumping grounds. for plastics, with a much higher chance of ending up in the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers.

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This is without counting the plastic waste dumped illegally by certain companies in other countries, often wrongly labeled as recyclable materials.

Some of these countries have started sending our unwanted waste back to Canada.

Based on these numbers, ending these practices would seem like a more effective way for Canada to do its part in the fight against global marine plastic pollution than banning single-use plastics.

Canada’s plastic makers are challenging in court the Trudeau government’s ban on single-use plastics, as well as its legal definition of plastics as “toxic”, in addition to warning that the policy will lead to job losses. The government claims that more jobs will be created.

With regard to the practical replacement of single-use plastics, the government has helpfully suggested, among other things, that the food industry should provide customers with more options that people can eat with their hands.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com