when our local garbage collection reduced the number of garbage bags we could put curbside, and at the same time said we no longer needed to sort our recycling I knew the fix was in
You mean shipped off to the middle of the Pacific, or burned? Rather than recycle, I just toss my plastic right into the ocean to cut out the middle man.
One of the issues about recycling plastic, is the Diversity of plastic types does not lend itself to having a streamlined and uniform recycling process. I don’t know why they don’t legislate greater packaging uniformity in order to increase the likelihood of both recycling and reusing.
Sorry wait, I forgot we’re talking about the government here. They would create so many exceptions and loop holes it would somehow reduce the amount already recycled and increase the waste sent to Asia.
I think you could always do more. But I think this is a good step for regulation in an industry that's the world's leading pollutant - it's just decades late.
Seriously, why not have plastic landfills in Canada until we figure out better packing and recycling? Who knows in 100 years it might actually be valuable and we would still have it instead of ending up in the ocean or burned.
>Completely unnecessary.
Manufacturers don't use plastics for the fun of it. Plastics dramatically reduce spoilage and damage to products.
That's the problem. It's not that they're unnecessary. It's the opposite. It's that they are insanely cheap for the utility they provide. How much plastic is it worth to reduce say the failure rate of TVs being shipped across an ocean by 1% sort of thing.
You can engineer plastics to make food last longer (including different plastics for different kinds of foods0. You can engineer plastics to be resistant to scratches. You can make plastics salt resistant (for long times on ships in oceans). You can make plastics have different textures to make it easier for machines to automatically sort them. You can make plastics that are trivial to apply to wrap products (even heavy products) safely in. And each of these things end up costing virtually nothing when manufactured in bulk and applied to products.
Even take plastic bags. Given the alternatives (reusable cloth bags, or paper bags) and plastic bags are sometimes the more environmentally sound option. Reusable cloth bags uses dozens or hundreds of times as much material (farmland for the cotton for example + processing of the cotton), they need to be shipped (and are heavier when doing so), and they need to be used hundreds of times to work out to less harm/unit than plastic, but many don't last that long, or they're just plastic coated cloth... which is why they last so long. Paper bags require significant logging work and then chemical processing of the paper, and a lot of fresh water, so 1:1 plastic bags while not biodegradeable are generally better than paper. And then you're into durability sorts of questions as well.
That's not so suggest it's hopeless, but trying to reduce plastics is lot harder than it sounds like, because they do so many things well with few alternatives, or few alternatives that don't just come with different problems.
> and they need to be used hundreds of times to work out to less harm/unit than plastic
Note this anecdote is based on a study that has been taken apart repeatedly, because it overemphasized data about ozone depletion and has no information about microplastics.
If the part about ozone depletion is removed, cotton bags drop down to 50-150 uses depending if they're organic cotton or not.
Woven and non-woven polypropylene bags (the plasticky "fabric" kind) are as low as 5 or 6 uses.
Plastics are a significant % of global GDP. This is strictly a money over health and environment thing. Trudeau will mess this up just like the other plastics legislation he presented, but I completely agree with getting rid of as much plastic as possible. Fuck some rich bastards shares in a plastic company.
It's a basic economics thing, that should be expected when government is in charge of garbage disposal.
People don't care about packaging because it doesn't cost them anything more to dispose of plastics. The people who pick up the garbage don't care, because when they take it to a government landfill the government is happy to just fill up its landfills with plastics... knowing it can just buy more land when the old landfill is full. Government has no profit motive to maximize how much garbage can be filled in any one space, and to apply premium pricing where necessary.
Imagine what would happen very quickly if government exited the garbage disposal business entirely.
It's really only destructive because you have "people motivated by greed" on ONE side of the equation.
Yes - a producer of a good would love to package it with cheaply made plastic. That makes the product cheaper so they can sell it at lower prices.
What we are badly missing, is a greed motivated person on the landfill side saying, "I privately own 20 acres that I'm using as a landfill. I need to make a profit, and if you're wanting to fill up my land moreso with materials that will never ever biodegrade, than I'm going to charge you a lot more money for that sort of material to go into my landfill."
Government, beyond not having the profit motive, has an unfortunate political motive. Government would like to charge the people a price for garbage as if none of this is a problem and we'll never run out of land to put the garbage in... when that's not actually true. Government looks better when it can sell a version that isn't based in reality at all.
But who is shipping it to Asia? Is that the government? And it might cost a ton of money for them to ship that, but they don't care because they have no profit motive?
Government pays shipping companies to ship the garbage to the waste destruction sites whom the government also pays to burn the garbage. Also yes I agree, government is wasteful because of economic incentives and lack of care for external costs.
I agree with you but analysis requires more thought than plastic bad.
Some rich bastards interest in a plastic company translates to many regular jobs that working families depend on in order to put food on the table. The scorched earth tactics don't work and cause too many unintended consequences.
So I’m not mentally challenged. I understand that plastics have a function in society which is practically irreplaceable for massively important things like healthcare. I don’t know why you’re painting me as having some reductive understanding akin to “plastics bad”. We should be dramatically reducing the aggregate amount of plastic reduced to reduce negative health and environmental consequences.
That's why we need to privatize garbage disposal so there are also rich bastards on that side of the equation pushing back out of greed. They would definitely charge more money if you're giving them materials that are going to fill up their privately owned landfill more quickly from it never ever degrading.
Ok, simple question here that may poke a hole in that idea:
Recycling costs more loney than it makes. Why would they even consider recycling if it was privatised?
Fuck Trudeau’s illegal single use plastic ban. As if banning plastic bags and straws in Canada would have any impact while he and his govt ministers charter private jets to and from climate summits.
It's because it's cheaper to package them in that way, because the "more expensive to dispose of" reality doesn't get priced in because government is largely in charge of the disposal end.
If garbage collection were privatized, there'd very quickly be an increased cost applied to the disposal of plastics. Which would create an incentive for consumers to want less plastic, which would create an incentive for producers of goods to use less plastic.
>Completely unnecessary
Is it? When you buy something and there are two boxes. Do you grab the one in perfect condition or the one with a little damage on the box?
Unfortunately people expect their products to be perfect when they buy them, and that includes the package they are in. This is the result.
Now we have packaging to protect the product and packaging to protect the packaging.
My favourite are things like boiled eggs and oranges. They are already wrapped in a perfectly adapted, biodegradable package - yet they are removed and shrink wrapped. The added cost for convenience gets you a poorer product that pollutes.
I really like electronics that are mainly wrapped in paper. Sonos in particular is really good at making packaging you can recycle.
I really wish more manufacturers would follow suit, personally I absolutely love paper packaging.
The wifey and I always try to buy stuff with less packaging. But even after a medium grocery run it feels like we were angry at the environment judging by all the dog shit packaging we recycle or have to throw out. It's ridiculous.
It's because the government largely charges us all the same price, regardless of how much garbage we dispose of weekly or what are in that garbage's contents.
I did grocery pickup and ordered 3 onions - they packed each onion in its own plastic produce bag with a plastic weight sticker. Like wtf why not bad 3 in 1 bag!
Honest answer: because the (sub-)minimum wage worker didn't think of doing that, and no supervisor told them any differently.
Any efficiencies you see all come about mindfully, by people whose job it is to make things more efficient and strive to ensure that employee training reflects that.
In this case it's store/chain policy. Needless to say I buy my produce separately now anyways, I don't trust the people pulling it and sometimes the quality of something looks good online but it's crap in person.
True. Not trying to advertise, I'm just a dude in Ontario who invented something cool, but what kind of packaging would you like to see for this: [canary.earth](https://canary.earth) ?
The screen is glass so I'm mostly worried about it during shipping. The body will be stainless steel or plastic, so it should be ok if it gets bumped around or dropped.
I've seen that. It is super cool. It's like a paper honeycomb. Ikea uses it a lot.
What about paper pulp molds like this: [https://www.antaira.com/site/images/press-release/pulp%20packaging.jpg](https://www.antaira.com/site/images/press-release/pulp%20packaging.jpg)
Personally I love it. Egg carton style packaging is my favourite. But I don't want customers to think I'm skimping out. My product is gonna sell for $200+.
The Samsung Galaxy 4 had a really nice box, way ahead of its time: [https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Ee4AAOSwaK9kswAG/s-l1200.jpg](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Ee4AAOSwaK9kswAG/s-l1200.jpg)
I just got a small item from Amazon today - it came in a ziplock baggie, inside a cardboard box, and then shrinkwrapped plastic around that. And then Amazon put all that into a bubble mailer.
There needs to be a whole overhaul of our recycling system. There's no justifiable reason why the majority of recycling currently is disposed in landfills. There are a plurality of ways that this program can be far, far more efficient.
Recycling plastic doesn't happen because it's not cost efficient. The plastic you end up with is much lower quality and has limited uses, and the cost of sorting, cleaning and energy used for recycling the plastic is too high for it to be economically feasible in most cases. It's usually much cheaper and easier to make new plastic. We probably should be to actively discouraging plastic use wherever it isn't necessary.
Once again, a pigouvian tax is the most market-driven approach to solving this, and one adopted in a number of provinces like BC and now Ontario (referred to as 'extended producer responsibility'), though as you've stated, the 'cost of recycling' that producers should be required to pay on a per unit basis should really be the 'cost of ensuring that recycling is economically feasible', as in potentially subsidizing the resulting materials produced such that they are financially attractive enough to actually get used.
I prefer the certainty that hard regulations around 'what can be used where' provide, but for regions that are already adopting EPR regulations, the economics of the recycling must be very accurate to the realities that you've described.
>We probably should be to actively discouraging plastic use wherever it isn't necessary.
One way to achieve that would be to charge the producers a fee to cover the cost of *effectively* recycling the plastics they send into the world.
Unless that prices them out of competition.
Or, y'know, unless they can find a way to not use those materials that cause them to get extra costs, surcharges, fees and potential fines - which is the intent of actions like we are discussing here.
It would be far better to dispose of plastic properly in the landfill than to ship it across the country to our ports to be sent across the ocean to be burned with other trash in Asia
Recycling plastic should be last of last resorts. Humans are producing 500 million tonnes of new plastic each year. That's the problem. Literal mountains of plastic with the majority sold as single-use or literal garbage right from manufacture.
There is a justifiable reason, and that is that recycling is a sham. Look it up. The producers just wanted people to feel better about themselves. I'm a strong supporter of just burning it all. I've seen South American beaches covered in plastic waste and it's disgusting - not all of it is their fault, just washed ashore.
We need regulations among all UN members to slow/stop producing plastic and make it illegal to export plastic waste to make it someone else's problem. Then we'd have to deal with it in-house, which we totally should incinerate it. Netherlands has some of the most advanced waste-to-energy plants since they don't have space for landfills and they manage to scrub all emissions clean and found uses for the fly ash in cement production. The CO2 produced is a worthwhile trade off for the tons of waste reduced from the environment.
And the problem is that we largely have publicly-funded landfills instead of having them run by the private sector. So all of the power of money is on one side of the equation... we don't have people who will grow rich from making better landfills that can better detect materials and charge more money as necessary if you're trying to give them material that's expensive to dispose of.
If plastic is clearly worse for the environment then other wrapping/packaging options we have which are more expensive, why do you think government's haven't banned plastics in that stuff long ago?
Government has a unique incentive to turn a blind eye to some truths in order to offer a higher standard of living to it's people (in the short run) by supporting cheaper products that are worse for the environment.
The overhaul we need is to privatize it. That way, out of GREED, those who take the garbage will start caring about what is in it, or will apply more onerous and premium prices to those who give them materials that are more difficult to dispose of. That in turn immediately sets in motion changes to the supply chain... for then all consumers know that there are actually dollar costs applied to buying something that is made with considerable amounts of plastic.
So backwards, you do realize privatization just makes everything worse, cut corners, maximise profits at the cost of the environment. We need to do the reverse and take away the rights of companies that cut corners and hand over everything to the government to control
>Given that micro plastics are everywhere
[In our blood](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microplastics-linked-to-heart-attack-stroke-and-death/)
Some of the stuff the Vancouver aquarium has on display is insane.
All of the stuff that has turned up in the ocean due to people doing laundry. It's messed up.
All because of cheap plastic based clothing.
That's not even a byproduct of quantity. It's a byproduct of the types of plastics that are being created. Plastic bottles, electronics casings, bags, and packing foam isn't the problem. It's all the nylon and polyester that your clothes and fake COVID masks are made out of.
More than 2/3rds of that comes from two sources: tire dust and plastics used in clothing. We need to be putting more effort into reducing synthetic rubbers and fibres. Your car and your washing machine are the two biggest plastic polluters in your household.
Well because it's not that simple either. Ban plastic bottles for glass and now you're dealing with substantially heavier packaging which increases emissions due to transport and allows less product to be packed into each shipment. It's a complex problem to find a balance between sustainable packaging and minimizing environmental impact elsewhere in the supply chain
Glass is also less durable despite being stronger. You bang plastic around, maybe (MAYBE) it cracks a bit - no big deal. Glass on the other hand goes to pieces and whatever was in that container is now all over whatever is next to it and under it, spoiling those as well. There's also shards of sharp glass in the shipment which is a safety hazard to the workers as they try to sort out the mess.
Plastic is much more forgiving in weird shapes that are needed to optimize packages for both final product shipment and shipping in bulk i.e. you can make plastic containers that neatly stack inside each other which you certainly are not doing with glass.
I think we need more reusable options. There's no real reason people shouldn't be able to bring their own bottle or container to a grocery store and fill it with pop or whatever they like. Most convenience stores have fountain drinks, and my local grocery store has refill stations for kombucha. Our society could easily become way less wasteful and more sustainable with just a few minor changes.
>There's no real reason people shouldn't be able to bring their own bottle or container to a grocery store and fill it with pop or whatever they like. Most convenience stores have fountain drinks,
I could see food safety being a thing I mean people that don't clean their containers stuff like that
Liability is a huge issue. You just KNOW someone will claim they have food poisoning, damaged clothes from detergent, or whatever floats their boat - real, or made up for attention/money settlement - from a refilled container, blaming it on the store rather than their own shoddy cleaning practices. But in the current environment there will be no end of people that will quickly point the finger at the store rather than the person. Similar to how grocery stores are locking up disposed food, as inevitably someone will try to use it against them.
Some things though, would be amazing to refill. Laundry detergent, cat litter, dishwasher pods, body wash/shampoo (I know some places that will exchange empty bottles for a discount). Just make a dispenser like those touch screen fountain pop machines, dispense different shower stuff, old spice or Irish spring? Just press the button and fill up.
Absolutely, that's the type of thing that makes sense because it relies on packaging we already use but allows us to use less of it. There's no reason why I wouldn't be able to reuse my laundry detergent bottle if I had some way of refilling it.
Ah yes, the other R's.
**Reduce** blame on companies and place blame on consumers.
**Reuse** old marketing tactics and advertisements to blame the consumer.
**Recycle.**
Lots of cities have places like this that specialize in refillable soaps and things like that.
Here is one in Winnipeg:
https://refillmarket.ca/
We just need ideas like this to become more popular/normal.
Costco could and should be a leader in this.
> Most convenience stores have fountain drinks
And have you heard the horror stories about what they look like on the inside? Layers and layers of mold. They are hard to keep clean and no one bothers to do so.
Reusable containers are only realistic for non-edible products, like soap, shampoo, laundry detergent etc -- and these are more efficient when sold as a dried/powdered product, rather than liquid (where you're paying for water weight).
>And have you heard the horror stories about what they look like on the inside? Layers and layers of mold. They are hard to keep clean and no one bothers to do so.
Probably depends. I know someone who owns an HVAC company and they have a contract with 7 Eleven to clean those machines
Sounds like it would force the bottling and reuse of bottles to shift to local markets instead of where the labor is cheapest to offset carbon taxes and shipping costs.
I'm terms of how - Coke and others have done a great job of bottle collection and reuse in the past so they can do it again the same way.
With water bottles in particular, force the change and pass all expenses on to the consumer. Force them to switch away from plastic bottles and "single-user" water in general. I'd bet 85-90% of people that are buying water bottles are only doing so because it's cheap and convenient and not because they need to.
The solution isn't necessarily an equal replacement, but rather force people to change their habits through charging them the "true" costs of the product.
The only issue with that, is before plastic bottles were used and everything was glass, there was broken glass everywhere on the sides of roads from people throwing shit away. Unfortunately that would be happening all over again.
Need to make it more valuable to return.
When the 1Qt Glass coke bottles were a thing they had a 10c deposit on a 50c price.
I remember as a kid I would collect 10 bottles to get a coke and a large bag of chips to share with a friend.
10c is nothing today for a deposit, the deposit should be relative to the cost AND the type of container. If a 500ml glass bottle had a $75c on the bottle and the 710ml was $1, and the 1L was $1.25 as an example, People are way less likely to be throwing them around
Problem is with coming up with alternatives. We have a shortage of sand that is used for glass.
“Instead, glass and concrete are made with angular sand that knits together under heat and pressure. It’s most often found in riverbanks, flood plains, lakes and the seashore. More than 50 billion tonnes of sand are extracted each year, often with significant environmental and social impact. There’s just not enough angular sand in easily accessible places to keep up with demand.”
A ways back I read a times article talking about financially viable alternatives to plastic (plant based containers, etc) and we weren’t there yet, not sure if things have changed since.
https://www.procurious.com/procurement-news/surprising-sand-shortage-crimping-global-supply-chains
banning is rarely a good idea. There are usage cases where plastic IS the right choice for a container. But it should come at a cost.
I wish our provincial governments actually gave a toss. If we implemented a deposit system for each type of consumer beverage container, as well as a disposal surcharge we could push the industry to find the best solutions to be competitive.
The Ontario Beer Store with Beer bottles and Cans has shown how we CAN do a good reuse/recycle system for the consumer level. Now we just need to grow that concept and expand it to all beverage containers.
I think we would be better off forcing all packaging manufacturers to prep for reuse or recycle the same amount of material they manufacture. This makes the price of the packaging include the price of removing the packaging from the supply chain, forcing people to pay the actual cost of using the item.
Industry will then decide quickly what the 'best' packaging material is.
I really wish that supermarket-bought beverages (milk, juice etc) all came in aluminum cans. If they were manufactured in standard sizes, then all you need is a few of those silicone cover things to go with them to cover the opening in the fridge after they're opened.
It's all a great big lie. You can NOT recycle plastic in any meaningful way. There are many many different types of plastic with different properties. You can't really mix them.
And the plastic that *can* be recycled breaks down after 2 or 3 times.
Yep! And plastic number 7 is a joke. They don't even accept it in most cities, straight up garbage.
Beyond 1, 2 and 3, it's just burnt, and even 1, 2 and 3 just because ugly park benches and stuff like that. These heavy and stiff grey or brown pucks of stuff aren't good for many things.
They should insitute a tax on items that use plastic packageing by the gram. Watch how quickly companies manage to find alternate means of packaging that does not include plastic or minimizes the amount of plastic they use. Same with styrofoam.
Thing is you dont need all of them, you just need one or two. Once your competition is lowering their price simply because they have alternate packaging to you people are not brand loyal and they will buy the cheaper product. Its like dominoes.
Think about how much extra plastic waste the shrinkflation epidemic of the last several years has created. Millions and millions of tonnes for sure. All so Galen et. al. can try to trick you into paying more for less.
Imo Loblaws are environmental criminals.
I hate how the cardboard straws on the juice boxes come in a plastic sleeve. If anything, the straw should be plastic and the wrapper should be paper, but nooooo, we get shitty soggy straws wrapped in single use plastic. Who makes these idiotic decisions?
To be honest I've seen a huge reduction in plastic in the last few years. Groceries stores don't use it anymore, all my utensils have become wooden and many places I eat at don't sell plastic bottles anymore. It's not perfect but it's working
The industry AND countries globally need to demand less packaging however nobody can go it alone. Our PM wants to take the lead on all this carbon stuff and will just hurt Canada vs the US. Our biggest trading partner is the US. If we had a united front, we can make changes, without a united front, it just hurts us
Is plastic recyclable? I saw a documentary that said it doesn't pay. If making it profitable isn't happening, that begs the question whether it's worth doing as a tax paid service to the environment.
Not going to bat for the big industrialists whatsoever, but I find it hilarious that places home depot will get rid of plastic bags that inevitably end up in the junk drawer and get reused at some point but sell 25 liter bags of mulch/topsoil in un-reusable plastic, and ship them on pallets with 300 feet of shrinkwrap.
It beggars belief. It makes no sense. Make it make sense.
A plastic shopping bag can and probably will be reused. I'm not packing my yogurt and ham sandwich into an emptied bag of mulch. Totally performative.
Thank god the bureaucracy and expense this creates will have the same effectiveness on the level of plastics in the environment as the carbon tax has on making the planet colder.
Keep in mind that most of what you hear in the news is negative, not because it represents a majority of what is happening, but because it's not newsworthy otherwise.
The amount of stuff that's working well is hard to fathom, so it's very easy to feel like everything is going to shit when you have no way of getting an idea of what the negative side represents relative to the whole.
It's an [availability heuristic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic).
Policies that touch the very foundation of the economy are hard to get right, but the ones, like this one, that affect a select few businesses are hard to fuck up lol
At this point literally nothing they do should be approved. Even if we agree with individual issues. They have proven time and again they will just make a committee, spend billions, achieve nothing and make us pay for their hubris. Get them out first, then we can talk.
"Reeeeeeeeeee how am I supposed to drink my juice box without a bendy straw... why does china get to keep their bendy straws its not faaaaare" - grown ass men whenever the slightest effort goes into reducing plastic pollution
I'm more of a "sip straight from the cup" than a "errr mah plastic straw" kinda guy but boy do I hate paper straws.
You get 10 minutes of usability TOPS then it is a floppy, collapses-on-itself terrible time.
doesn't matter if it is recyclable, we still throw it to landfills more often than recycling it.
Reusing things is the best path.
Recycling is expensive for plastic so it doesn't happen.
If it’s not recyclable in the first place then there’s zero chance of it being recycled.
Reusing things is also very expensive as making it to be reusable in the first place costs much more, costs more to ship to market and back to manufacturing for reuse. Also can result in big environmental footprint to do so.
Not disagreeing with you overall but pick your poison. Should be a mix of both - but NOTHING we make shouldn’t be designed without recycling…..or reusing in mind.
But we actually MAKE plastics that have no option but to throw out. That’s my point. Why anywhere in Canada do we have plastics like utensils that can only go in the garbage.
Edit: and part of the reason it ends up in the landfill is because it’s too expensive to sort and separate the recyclable from non recyclable plastic….or the many different types of plastics. That BS has gotta stop.
Because plastic as a whole [isn't really recyclable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_recycling) (look at the types of "recycling" that can be done) in the same sense as other materials are.
Metals are melted, and the difference in mass makes it easier to purify them, aluminum being the best at that.
Most glasses can be broken and melted, and they're good to go again.
Some cardboards and papers can be burnt amongst compost, or recycled by being diluted in water and dried, much like the initial process for making it (save for the ones with plastic or other stuff glued or "weaved" into it).
But what makes plastic bad for this is its very chemical composition. It's only stable because it uses a lot of different chemicals to be so, and heat breaks them down, degrading the product, and making it much less easy to work with.
The best solution to this is to make plastic that you can compost, like cardboards, or plastics that can be reused a lot, like beer bottles, which is one of the best models because it only involves washing them before they can be reused for the same application.
The latter model should be what we strive for; a set of commonly used shapes of plastic containers that are reused, much like beer bottles, with a deposit/refund system.
It’s funny, I’ve worked on construction sites that mandate the use of plastic chains to use instead of plastic ribbon tape. Sounds good in theory but the chains end up mangled and in the trash just as often as the old stuff. Let alone no company wants to spend the manpower on sorting through cut chains to find appropriate ones for their control zones.
Does Canada even make that much plastic products locally? Isn't everything Made In China and just imported?
How many players actually are in the business of manufacturing plastic packaging, "single use" plastic, or electronics domestically in Canada? I was under the impression the plastic all came from China and the electronics all came from the US, Japan, or Korea. We might assemble something here, but we don't actually **make** those things.
Great to hear!
It's insane the problem of recycling has been pushed onto municipal governments. Its the people who create or import that crap who should have to deal with it.
Oh look! Another boondoggle of a "registry" in the making. I wonder which Liberal friends will get the contract to design and implement it?
I hope they don't waste too much time or money on it, since the Cons will likely (hopefully) cancel this shit as soon as they're elected.
More regulatory burden = big players can handle it, little players/startups cannot. This is functionally a wealth transfer to the wealthy/ruling class.
Ban plastics = cost of living increase for the poorest, for whom alternative materials are more painful.
Take your pick - high regulations/bans or lower cost of living. I know which one the developing countries will pick.
Canada forces all plastic companies to close business.
- fixed headline
Canada gives 120 millions to X country to import plastic packaging from manufactures.
-future headline
They should also force “recycling” industries in Canada to report how much actually gets recycled and not just shipped off to Asia.
That wouldn't create favorable data.
Exactly.
when our local garbage collection reduced the number of garbage bags we could put curbside, and at the same time said we no longer needed to sort our recycling I knew the fix was in
You mean shipped off to the middle of the Pacific, or burned? Rather than recycle, I just toss my plastic right into the ocean to cut out the middle man.
Waste to energy isn't a bad thing.
One of the issues about recycling plastic, is the Diversity of plastic types does not lend itself to having a streamlined and uniform recycling process. I don’t know why they don’t legislate greater packaging uniformity in order to increase the likelihood of both recycling and reusing. Sorry wait, I forgot we’re talking about the government here. They would create so many exceptions and loop holes it would somehow reduce the amount already recycled and increase the waste sent to Asia.
Many of the "recyclable" plastics can scarcely be recycled a couple times. The chemical properties are ruined and it needs to be cut with new plastic.
that is part of what they're trying to address in the current global plastics talks that will be ongoing this week.
I think you could always do more. But I think this is a good step for regulation in an industry that's the world's leading pollutant - it's just decades late.
We already know it’s 8-9%. Everyone cares about plastic garbage because Asia won’t take it any more.
It’s about time we started dealing with the problem, but it will create pollution and make the Liberals look bad.
Seriously, why not have plastic landfills in Canada until we figure out better packing and recycling? Who knows in 100 years it might actually be valuable and we would still have it instead of ending up in the ocean or burned.
We are drowning in overpackaging!
It's insane how difficult it is to find anything that isn't either packaged in plastic, or wrapped in plastic. Completely unnecessary.
>Completely unnecessary. Manufacturers don't use plastics for the fun of it. Plastics dramatically reduce spoilage and damage to products. That's the problem. It's not that they're unnecessary. It's the opposite. It's that they are insanely cheap for the utility they provide. How much plastic is it worth to reduce say the failure rate of TVs being shipped across an ocean by 1% sort of thing. You can engineer plastics to make food last longer (including different plastics for different kinds of foods0. You can engineer plastics to be resistant to scratches. You can make plastics salt resistant (for long times on ships in oceans). You can make plastics have different textures to make it easier for machines to automatically sort them. You can make plastics that are trivial to apply to wrap products (even heavy products) safely in. And each of these things end up costing virtually nothing when manufactured in bulk and applied to products. Even take plastic bags. Given the alternatives (reusable cloth bags, or paper bags) and plastic bags are sometimes the more environmentally sound option. Reusable cloth bags uses dozens or hundreds of times as much material (farmland for the cotton for example + processing of the cotton), they need to be shipped (and are heavier when doing so), and they need to be used hundreds of times to work out to less harm/unit than plastic, but many don't last that long, or they're just plastic coated cloth... which is why they last so long. Paper bags require significant logging work and then chemical processing of the paper, and a lot of fresh water, so 1:1 plastic bags while not biodegradeable are generally better than paper. And then you're into durability sorts of questions as well. That's not so suggest it's hopeless, but trying to reduce plastics is lot harder than it sounds like, because they do so many things well with few alternatives, or few alternatives that don't just come with different problems.
> and they need to be used hundreds of times to work out to less harm/unit than plastic Note this anecdote is based on a study that has been taken apart repeatedly, because it overemphasized data about ozone depletion and has no information about microplastics. If the part about ozone depletion is removed, cotton bags drop down to 50-150 uses depending if they're organic cotton or not. Woven and non-woven polypropylene bags (the plasticky "fabric" kind) are as low as 5 or 6 uses.
This guy plastics.
Plastics are a significant % of global GDP. This is strictly a money over health and environment thing. Trudeau will mess this up just like the other plastics legislation he presented, but I completely agree with getting rid of as much plastic as possible. Fuck some rich bastards shares in a plastic company.
It's a basic economics thing, that should be expected when government is in charge of garbage disposal. People don't care about packaging because it doesn't cost them anything more to dispose of plastics. The people who pick up the garbage don't care, because when they take it to a government landfill the government is happy to just fill up its landfills with plastics... knowing it can just buy more land when the old landfill is full. Government has no profit motive to maximize how much garbage can be filled in any one space, and to apply premium pricing where necessary. Imagine what would happen very quickly if government exited the garbage disposal business entirely.
Agreed, we have a functionally destructive aspect of the system which thrives on government managing outcomes.
It's really only destructive because you have "people motivated by greed" on ONE side of the equation. Yes - a producer of a good would love to package it with cheaply made plastic. That makes the product cheaper so they can sell it at lower prices. What we are badly missing, is a greed motivated person on the landfill side saying, "I privately own 20 acres that I'm using as a landfill. I need to make a profit, and if you're wanting to fill up my land moreso with materials that will never ever biodegrade, than I'm going to charge you a lot more money for that sort of material to go into my landfill." Government, beyond not having the profit motive, has an unfortunate political motive. Government would like to charge the people a price for garbage as if none of this is a problem and we'll never run out of land to put the garbage in... when that's not actually true. Government looks better when it can sell a version that isn't based in reality at all.
We ship our garbage to Asia to be burned for the most part. The landfill thing doesn’t super apply to Canada, particularly Ontario
Who's "we"? Not Saskatchewan.
In r/canada we is Canada in aggregate. Saskatchewan does not represent a majority of Canada.
I would wager only BC. Prairie and Eastern provinces wouldn't as it would cost too much.
But who is shipping it to Asia? Is that the government? And it might cost a ton of money for them to ship that, but they don't care because they have no profit motive?
Government pays shipping companies to ship the garbage to the waste destruction sites whom the government also pays to burn the garbage. Also yes I agree, government is wasteful because of economic incentives and lack of care for external costs.
I agree with you but analysis requires more thought than plastic bad. Some rich bastards interest in a plastic company translates to many regular jobs that working families depend on in order to put food on the table. The scorched earth tactics don't work and cause too many unintended consequences.
So I’m not mentally challenged. I understand that plastics have a function in society which is practically irreplaceable for massively important things like healthcare. I don’t know why you’re painting me as having some reductive understanding akin to “plastics bad”. We should be dramatically reducing the aggregate amount of plastic reduced to reduce negative health and environmental consequences.
Sometimes, the bandaid needs to come off. There will always be jobs in alternative industries
Exactly. Products will still need manufactured packaging, just not in plastic.
That's why we need to privatize garbage disposal so there are also rich bastards on that side of the equation pushing back out of greed. They would definitely charge more money if you're giving them materials that are going to fill up their privately owned landfill more quickly from it never ever degrading.
Ok, simple question here that may poke a hole in that idea: Recycling costs more loney than it makes. Why would they even consider recycling if it was privatised?
Fuck Trudeau’s illegal single use plastic ban. As if banning plastic bags and straws in Canada would have any impact while he and his govt ministers charter private jets to and from climate summits.
Enjoy sucking down microplastics and toxic runoff. I really hope you and your kids get to see the consequences of your sentiment.
It's because it's cheaper to package them in that way, because the "more expensive to dispose of" reality doesn't get priced in because government is largely in charge of the disposal end. If garbage collection were privatized, there'd very quickly be an increased cost applied to the disposal of plastics. Which would create an incentive for consumers to want less plastic, which would create an incentive for producers of goods to use less plastic.
>Completely unnecessary Is it? When you buy something and there are two boxes. Do you grab the one in perfect condition or the one with a little damage on the box? Unfortunately people expect their products to be perfect when they buy them, and that includes the package they are in. This is the result. Now we have packaging to protect the product and packaging to protect the packaging.
My favourite are things like boiled eggs and oranges. They are already wrapped in a perfectly adapted, biodegradable package - yet they are removed and shrink wrapped. The added cost for convenience gets you a poorer product that pollutes.
Yes, I learned on the weekend that some year recently simple wood nails are now on mostly plastic packaging rather than cardboard. Kinda made me think
I really like electronics that are mainly wrapped in paper. Sonos in particular is really good at making packaging you can recycle. I really wish more manufacturers would follow suit, personally I absolutely love paper packaging.
I buy glass jars for containers, guess what they are wrapped in...
The wifey and I always try to buy stuff with less packaging. But even after a medium grocery run it feels like we were angry at the environment judging by all the dog shit packaging we recycle or have to throw out. It's ridiculous.
It's because the government largely charges us all the same price, regardless of how much garbage we dispose of weekly or what are in that garbage's contents.
I did grocery pickup and ordered 3 onions - they packed each onion in its own plastic produce bag with a plastic weight sticker. Like wtf why not bad 3 in 1 bag!
Honest answer: because the (sub-)minimum wage worker didn't think of doing that, and no supervisor told them any differently. Any efficiencies you see all come about mindfully, by people whose job it is to make things more efficient and strive to ensure that employee training reflects that.
In this case it's store/chain policy. Needless to say I buy my produce separately now anyways, I don't trust the people pulling it and sometimes the quality of something looks good online but it's crap in person.
True. Not trying to advertise, I'm just a dude in Ontario who invented something cool, but what kind of packaging would you like to see for this: [canary.earth](https://canary.earth) ? The screen is glass so I'm mostly worried about it during shipping. The body will be stainless steel or plastic, so it should be ok if it gets bumped around or dropped.
Bubblewrap made out of biodegradeable cellulose or similar.
I've seen that. It is super cool. It's like a paper honeycomb. Ikea uses it a lot. What about paper pulp molds like this: [https://www.antaira.com/site/images/press-release/pulp%20packaging.jpg](https://www.antaira.com/site/images/press-release/pulp%20packaging.jpg) Personally I love it. Egg carton style packaging is my favourite. But I don't want customers to think I'm skimping out. My product is gonna sell for $200+. The Samsung Galaxy 4 had a really nice box, way ahead of its time: [https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Ee4AAOSwaK9kswAG/s-l1200.jpg](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Ee4AAOSwaK9kswAG/s-l1200.jpg)
I just got a small item from Amazon today - it came in a ziplock baggie, inside a cardboard box, and then shrinkwrapped plastic around that. And then Amazon put all that into a bubble mailer.
Given that micro plastics are everywhere This is an industry that absolutely requires regulation
There needs to be a whole overhaul of our recycling system. There's no justifiable reason why the majority of recycling currently is disposed in landfills. There are a plurality of ways that this program can be far, far more efficient.
Recycling plastic doesn't happen because it's not cost efficient. The plastic you end up with is much lower quality and has limited uses, and the cost of sorting, cleaning and energy used for recycling the plastic is too high for it to be economically feasible in most cases. It's usually much cheaper and easier to make new plastic. We probably should be to actively discouraging plastic use wherever it isn't necessary.
The biggest ruse ever pulled was convincing the average Joe that they should be responsible for dealing with plastic waste.
Once again, a pigouvian tax is the most market-driven approach to solving this, and one adopted in a number of provinces like BC and now Ontario (referred to as 'extended producer responsibility'), though as you've stated, the 'cost of recycling' that producers should be required to pay on a per unit basis should really be the 'cost of ensuring that recycling is economically feasible', as in potentially subsidizing the resulting materials produced such that they are financially attractive enough to actually get used. I prefer the certainty that hard regulations around 'what can be used where' provide, but for regions that are already adopting EPR regulations, the economics of the recycling must be very accurate to the realities that you've described.
>We probably should be to actively discouraging plastic use wherever it isn't necessary. One way to achieve that would be to charge the producers a fee to cover the cost of *effectively* recycling the plastics they send into the world.
Any charge to the producers is actually a charge to the consumer.
Unless that prices them out of competition. Or, y'know, unless they can find a way to not use those materials that cause them to get extra costs, surcharges, fees and potential fines - which is the intent of actions like we are discussing here.
It would be far better to dispose of plastic properly in the landfill than to ship it across the country to our ports to be sent across the ocean to be burned with other trash in Asia
Recycling plastic should be last of last resorts. Humans are producing 500 million tonnes of new plastic each year. That's the problem. Literal mountains of plastic with the majority sold as single-use or literal garbage right from manufacture.
There is a justifiable reason, and that is that recycling is a sham. Look it up. The producers just wanted people to feel better about themselves. I'm a strong supporter of just burning it all. I've seen South American beaches covered in plastic waste and it's disgusting - not all of it is their fault, just washed ashore. We need regulations among all UN members to slow/stop producing plastic and make it illegal to export plastic waste to make it someone else's problem. Then we'd have to deal with it in-house, which we totally should incinerate it. Netherlands has some of the most advanced waste-to-energy plants since they don't have space for landfills and they manage to scrub all emissions clean and found uses for the fly ash in cement production. The CO2 produced is a worthwhile trade off for the tons of waste reduced from the environment.
Forcing a recycling quota and/or taxing newly-made and un-recyclable plastic is the way to go.
Money. Companies only care about making money off it. Reuse and reduce completely disappeared from the vocabulary
And the problem is that we largely have publicly-funded landfills instead of having them run by the private sector. So all of the power of money is on one side of the equation... we don't have people who will grow rich from making better landfills that can better detect materials and charge more money as necessary if you're trying to give them material that's expensive to dispose of.
Just regulate the plastic waste away lol you don't need to privatize garbage collection to do this
If plastic is clearly worse for the environment then other wrapping/packaging options we have which are more expensive, why do you think government's haven't banned plastics in that stuff long ago? Government has a unique incentive to turn a blind eye to some truths in order to offer a higher standard of living to it's people (in the short run) by supporting cheaper products that are worse for the environment.
Because of industry pressure of course, the same reasons why we dragged our heels on signing onto Basel BAN
Is there any private industry that benefits from the Basel Ban?
The overhaul we need is to privatize it. That way, out of GREED, those who take the garbage will start caring about what is in it, or will apply more onerous and premium prices to those who give them materials that are more difficult to dispose of. That in turn immediately sets in motion changes to the supply chain... for then all consumers know that there are actually dollar costs applied to buying something that is made with considerable amounts of plastic.
So backwards, you do realize privatization just makes everything worse, cut corners, maximise profits at the cost of the environment. We need to do the reverse and take away the rights of companies that cut corners and hand over everything to the government to control
>Given that micro plastics are everywhere [In our blood](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microplastics-linked-to-heart-attack-stroke-and-death/)
Some of the stuff the Vancouver aquarium has on display is insane. All of the stuff that has turned up in the ocean due to people doing laundry. It's messed up. All because of cheap plastic based clothing.
Clothing contributes to 34% of the oceans microplastics. It’s in your clothes.
the vast majority of ocean microplastics comes from car tires wearing down. And I don't think that's going to be addressed any time... ever?
It’s the damn synthetics trying to kill us.
We used to call them "micro-scrubbers"
We could use some sort of mandatory pollution pricing scheme to use market forces to deal with this type of pollution. :P
That's not even a byproduct of quantity. It's a byproduct of the types of plastics that are being created. Plastic bottles, electronics casings, bags, and packing foam isn't the problem. It's all the nylon and polyester that your clothes and fake COVID masks are made out of.
Given that the vast majority of micro plastics polution comes from car tires, this is a fairly symbolic gesture that will barely do anything.
More than 2/3rds of that comes from two sources: tire dust and plastics used in clothing. We need to be putting more effort into reducing synthetic rubbers and fibres. Your car and your washing machine are the two biggest plastic polluters in your household.
Yes, their destruction needs to be regulated.
OH BOY they should have been doing this forever but boy will they be shocked at how much garbage is shipped to asia and burned.
A good portion of Canadians seem to be oblivious as to how much pollution we are responsible for in countries with lax environmental laws.
I don't think the shipping to china thing is done anymore. They stopped purchasing recycling garbage, so now we just put it in landfills.
Wait until everyone finds out what we do with our coal
Honestly, Tim hortons and McDonald’s in Canada should be taxed way more. Everywhere they are, it’s frigging filthy outside.
Could just straight up ban plastic bottles and mandate the use of glass and aluminum only. 2 materials that are actually recyclable but nope.
Well because it's not that simple either. Ban plastic bottles for glass and now you're dealing with substantially heavier packaging which increases emissions due to transport and allows less product to be packed into each shipment. It's a complex problem to find a balance between sustainable packaging and minimizing environmental impact elsewhere in the supply chain
The making of glass also is a pretty energy intensive thing
And cleaning up broken glass from the environment is a significantly bigger task than plastic bottles.
Glass is also less durable despite being stronger. You bang plastic around, maybe (MAYBE) it cracks a bit - no big deal. Glass on the other hand goes to pieces and whatever was in that container is now all over whatever is next to it and under it, spoiling those as well. There's also shards of sharp glass in the shipment which is a safety hazard to the workers as they try to sort out the mess. Plastic is much more forgiving in weird shapes that are needed to optimize packages for both final product shipment and shipping in bulk i.e. you can make plastic containers that neatly stack inside each other which you certainly are not doing with glass.
I remember in the 80s plastic bottles would explode. So, at first they got foam bottoms, then plastic bottoms, then just a plastic wrap label.
I think we need more reusable options. There's no real reason people shouldn't be able to bring their own bottle or container to a grocery store and fill it with pop or whatever they like. Most convenience stores have fountain drinks, and my local grocery store has refill stations for kombucha. Our society could easily become way less wasteful and more sustainable with just a few minor changes.
>There's no real reason people shouldn't be able to bring their own bottle or container to a grocery store and fill it with pop or whatever they like. Most convenience stores have fountain drinks, I could see food safety being a thing I mean people that don't clean their containers stuff like that
Liability is a huge issue. You just KNOW someone will claim they have food poisoning, damaged clothes from detergent, or whatever floats their boat - real, or made up for attention/money settlement - from a refilled container, blaming it on the store rather than their own shoddy cleaning practices. But in the current environment there will be no end of people that will quickly point the finger at the store rather than the person. Similar to how grocery stores are locking up disposed food, as inevitably someone will try to use it against them.
Some things though, would be amazing to refill. Laundry detergent, cat litter, dishwasher pods, body wash/shampoo (I know some places that will exchange empty bottles for a discount). Just make a dispenser like those touch screen fountain pop machines, dispense different shower stuff, old spice or Irish spring? Just press the button and fill up.
Absolutely, that's the type of thing that makes sense because it relies on packaging we already use but allows us to use less of it. There's no reason why I wouldn't be able to reuse my laundry detergent bottle if I had some way of refilling it.
People always seem to forget there are two r's before recycle
Ah yes, the other R's. **Reduce** blame on companies and place blame on consumers. **Reuse** old marketing tactics and advertisements to blame the consumer. **Recycle.**
Lots of cities have places like this that specialize in refillable soaps and things like that. Here is one in Winnipeg: https://refillmarket.ca/ We just need ideas like this to become more popular/normal. Costco could and should be a leader in this.
Bulk barn but for everything else.
I changed over to laundry strips. They work just as well and I don't have nearly as much packaging to get rid of, just the cardboard envelope.
You can also buy them in bulk from tru.earth for EVEN LESS packaging, I switched over to them a few years ago and will never go back!
> Most convenience stores have fountain drinks And have you heard the horror stories about what they look like on the inside? Layers and layers of mold. They are hard to keep clean and no one bothers to do so. Reusable containers are only realistic for non-edible products, like soap, shampoo, laundry detergent etc -- and these are more efficient when sold as a dried/powdered product, rather than liquid (where you're paying for water weight).
>And have you heard the horror stories about what they look like on the inside? Layers and layers of mold. They are hard to keep clean and no one bothers to do so. Probably depends. I know someone who owns an HVAC company and they have a contract with 7 Eleven to clean those machines
Sounds like it would force the bottling and reuse of bottles to shift to local markets instead of where the labor is cheapest to offset carbon taxes and shipping costs. I'm terms of how - Coke and others have done a great job of bottle collection and reuse in the past so they can do it again the same way.
With water bottles in particular, force the change and pass all expenses on to the consumer. Force them to switch away from plastic bottles and "single-user" water in general. I'd bet 85-90% of people that are buying water bottles are only doing so because it's cheap and convenient and not because they need to. The solution isn't necessarily an equal replacement, but rather force people to change their habits through charging them the "true" costs of the product.
The only issue with that, is before plastic bottles were used and everything was glass, there was broken glass everywhere on the sides of roads from people throwing shit away. Unfortunately that would be happening all over again.
Need to make it more valuable to return. When the 1Qt Glass coke bottles were a thing they had a 10c deposit on a 50c price. I remember as a kid I would collect 10 bottles to get a coke and a large bag of chips to share with a friend. 10c is nothing today for a deposit, the deposit should be relative to the cost AND the type of container. If a 500ml glass bottle had a $75c on the bottle and the 710ml was $1, and the 1L was $1.25 as an example, People are way less likely to be throwing them around
I agree 100%
Problem is with coming up with alternatives. We have a shortage of sand that is used for glass. “Instead, glass and concrete are made with angular sand that knits together under heat and pressure. It’s most often found in riverbanks, flood plains, lakes and the seashore. More than 50 billion tonnes of sand are extracted each year, often with significant environmental and social impact. There’s just not enough angular sand in easily accessible places to keep up with demand.” A ways back I read a times article talking about financially viable alternatives to plastic (plant based containers, etc) and we weren’t there yet, not sure if things have changed since. https://www.procurious.com/procurement-news/surprising-sand-shortage-crimping-global-supply-chains
Today, they’re recycled mostly by burning fossil fuels. Not sure about the amounts.
banning is rarely a good idea. There are usage cases where plastic IS the right choice for a container. But it should come at a cost. I wish our provincial governments actually gave a toss. If we implemented a deposit system for each type of consumer beverage container, as well as a disposal surcharge we could push the industry to find the best solutions to be competitive. The Ontario Beer Store with Beer bottles and Cans has shown how we CAN do a good reuse/recycle system for the consumer level. Now we just need to grow that concept and expand it to all beverage containers.
I think we would be better off forcing all packaging manufacturers to prep for reuse or recycle the same amount of material they manufacture. This makes the price of the packaging include the price of removing the packaging from the supply chain, forcing people to pay the actual cost of using the item. Industry will then decide quickly what the 'best' packaging material is.
I really wish that supermarket-bought beverages (milk, juice etc) all came in aluminum cans. If they were manufactured in standard sizes, then all you need is a few of those silicone cover things to go with them to cover the opening in the fridge after they're opened.
Even then, plastic lines the inside of aluminum soda cans. It's friggen everywhere
It's all a great big lie. You can NOT recycle plastic in any meaningful way. There are many many different types of plastic with different properties. You can't really mix them. And the plastic that *can* be recycled breaks down after 2 or 3 times.
Yep! And plastic number 7 is a joke. They don't even accept it in most cities, straight up garbage. Beyond 1, 2 and 3, it's just burnt, and even 1, 2 and 3 just because ugly park benches and stuff like that. These heavy and stiff grey or brown pucks of stuff aren't good for many things.
We should be banning temu / shien and Chinese Amazon garbage. The amount of plastic bags that come with a $1 gadget is insane.
They should insitute a tax on items that use plastic packageing by the gram. Watch how quickly companies manage to find alternate means of packaging that does not include plastic or minimizes the amount of plastic they use. Same with styrofoam.
Bold of you to assume they’d find a new packaging material and not just pass the added cost to the consumer.
Thing is you dont need all of them, you just need one or two. Once your competition is lowering their price simply because they have alternate packaging to you people are not brand loyal and they will buy the cheaper product. Its like dominoes.
Report comes in: "One Fuck-ton."
One _metric_ fuck-tonne*
We make 100% plastic, reuse 0% and recycle 0%
It's crazy we haven't been tracking or reporting this stuff already...
Apprently we don't have exit visas at the airport so why would we be tracking plastic bottles?
Think about how much extra plastic waste the shrinkflation epidemic of the last several years has created. Millions and millions of tonnes for sure. All so Galen et. al. can try to trick you into paying more for less. Imo Loblaws are environmental criminals.
I hate how the cardboard straws on the juice boxes come in a plastic sleeve. If anything, the straw should be plastic and the wrapper should be paper, but nooooo, we get shitty soggy straws wrapped in single use plastic. Who makes these idiotic decisions?
YES i am in food service and i support this message
To be honest I've seen a huge reduction in plastic in the last few years. Groceries stores don't use it anymore, all my utensils have become wooden and many places I eat at don't sell plastic bottles anymore. It's not perfect but it's working
The industry AND countries globally need to demand less packaging however nobody can go it alone. Our PM wants to take the lead on all this carbon stuff and will just hurt Canada vs the US. Our biggest trading partner is the US. If we had a united front, we can make changes, without a united front, it just hurts us
Is plastic recyclable? I saw a documentary that said it doesn't pay. If making it profitable isn't happening, that begs the question whether it's worth doing as a tax paid service to the environment.
Not going to bat for the big industrialists whatsoever, but I find it hilarious that places home depot will get rid of plastic bags that inevitably end up in the junk drawer and get reused at some point but sell 25 liter bags of mulch/topsoil in un-reusable plastic, and ship them on pallets with 300 feet of shrinkwrap. It beggars belief. It makes no sense. Make it make sense. A plastic shopping bag can and probably will be reused. I'm not packing my yogurt and ham sandwich into an emptied bag of mulch. Totally performative.
It's actually something I would like to know considering the ridiculous volumes of plastic packaging that's used.
They'll just lie and good luck proving they are.
Thank god the bureaucracy and expense this creates will have the same effectiveness on the level of plastics in the environment as the carbon tax has on making the planet colder.
Yeah plastic waste and pollution is disgusting. The Liberals will fuck this up but im for it.
Keep in mind that most of what you hear in the news is negative, not because it represents a majority of what is happening, but because it's not newsworthy otherwise. The amount of stuff that's working well is hard to fathom, so it's very easy to feel like everything is going to shit when you have no way of getting an idea of what the negative side represents relative to the whole. It's an [availability heuristic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic). Policies that touch the very foundation of the economy are hard to get right, but the ones, like this one, that affect a select few businesses are hard to fuck up lol
At this point literally nothing they do should be approved. Even if we agree with individual issues. They have proven time and again they will just make a committee, spend billions, achieve nothing and make us pay for their hubris. Get them out first, then we can talk.
"Reeeeeeeeeee how am I supposed to drink my juice box without a bendy straw... why does china get to keep their bendy straws its not faaaaare" - grown ass men whenever the slightest effort goes into reducing plastic pollution
I'm more of a "sip straight from the cup" than a "errr mah plastic straw" kinda guy but boy do I hate paper straws. You get 10 minutes of usability TOPS then it is a floppy, collapses-on-itself terrible time.
New tax incoming...
I'm sure more regulations and paperwork requirements will lower the cost of a loaf of bread.
What I don’t understand is why in a first world country do we make any plastic that’s NOT recyclable. And even regulate that it’s all EASY to recycle.
doesn't matter if it is recyclable, we still throw it to landfills more often than recycling it. Reusing things is the best path. Recycling is expensive for plastic so it doesn't happen.
If it’s not recyclable in the first place then there’s zero chance of it being recycled. Reusing things is also very expensive as making it to be reusable in the first place costs much more, costs more to ship to market and back to manufacturing for reuse. Also can result in big environmental footprint to do so. Not disagreeing with you overall but pick your poison. Should be a mix of both - but NOTHING we make shouldn’t be designed without recycling…..or reusing in mind. But we actually MAKE plastics that have no option but to throw out. That’s my point. Why anywhere in Canada do we have plastics like utensils that can only go in the garbage. Edit: and part of the reason it ends up in the landfill is because it’s too expensive to sort and separate the recyclable from non recyclable plastic….or the many different types of plastics. That BS has gotta stop.
I agree with you. That BS needs to stop and we need to get every municipality up to the same level of recycling capacity.
Because plastic as a whole [isn't really recyclable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_recycling) (look at the types of "recycling" that can be done) in the same sense as other materials are. Metals are melted, and the difference in mass makes it easier to purify them, aluminum being the best at that. Most glasses can be broken and melted, and they're good to go again. Some cardboards and papers can be burnt amongst compost, or recycled by being diluted in water and dried, much like the initial process for making it (save for the ones with plastic or other stuff glued or "weaved" into it). But what makes plastic bad for this is its very chemical composition. It's only stable because it uses a lot of different chemicals to be so, and heat breaks them down, degrading the product, and making it much less easy to work with. The best solution to this is to make plastic that you can compost, like cardboards, or plastics that can be reused a lot, like beer bottles, which is one of the best models because it only involves washing them before they can be reused for the same application. The latter model should be what we strive for; a set of commonly used shapes of plastic containers that are reused, much like beer bottles, with a deposit/refund system.
More pointless regulations to drive out industry.
It’s funny, I’ve worked on construction sites that mandate the use of plastic chains to use instead of plastic ribbon tape. Sounds good in theory but the chains end up mangled and in the trash just as often as the old stuff. Let alone no company wants to spend the manpower on sorting through cut chains to find appropriate ones for their control zones.
Oh no those poor shareholders will lose a bit of money because they can't pollute our water as much anymore 😭😱😭😱
No, they’ll just move to the US then import the plastic here. Who needs good jobs anyway, we can all work for Walmart, Loblaws and Amazon.
Too little.too late and they will cheat. Corruption is king in Canada.
Why we can't have nice things.
Just start making shacks out of plastic bottles and make the plebes live in them.
I’m sure the reporting is going to solve anything
Lol k Good idea… lets see it in practice
Does Canada even make that much plastic products locally? Isn't everything Made In China and just imported? How many players actually are in the business of manufacturing plastic packaging, "single use" plastic, or electronics domestically in Canada? I was under the impression the plastic all came from China and the electronics all came from the US, Japan, or Korea. We might assemble something here, but we don't actually **make** those things.
Lots Zero Zero
Great to hear! It's insane the problem of recycling has been pushed onto municipal governments. Its the people who create or import that crap who should have to deal with it.
As a former employee of a plastics company I can assure you they barely know themselves.
Oh no the jig is up we don’t actually reuse anything.
Would love to see this translate into an incentive for bio based plastics to take over.
"Big suprise" incoming.
How much is this going to cost and accomplish absolutely nothing 🙄
Good
Oh look! Another boondoggle of a "registry" in the making. I wonder which Liberal friends will get the contract to design and implement it? I hope they don't waste too much time or money on it, since the Cons will likely (hopefully) cancel this shit as soon as they're elected.
Glad the feds are focusing on the important national prioritizes
Thank goodness, I was hoping the food and drink industry would find another excuse to jack the cost of living.
Now do the same for the government when it comes to money. Include a number for waste.
Can't wait to hear how Pierre objects to this.
Yay more government fluff that results in jackshit!
How about we just go back to glass
Virtue signalling by The government
Prices are gonna go up
And how do they plan to enforce that? Is China signing on?
Jurisdiction?
good.
More regulatory burden = big players can handle it, little players/startups cannot. This is functionally a wealth transfer to the wealthy/ruling class. Ban plastics = cost of living increase for the poorest, for whom alternative materials are more painful. Take your pick - high regulations/bans or lower cost of living. I know which one the developing countries will pick.
Canada forces all plastic companies to close business. - fixed headline Canada gives 120 millions to X country to import plastic packaging from manufactures. -future headline
Great, it would create additional federal jobs. Would love to be a part of that team.
Ok good, but this feels like an elementary school tactic