Anti-plastics push is lacking
CANADA’S G7 STANCE IS LIMITED BY DOMESTIC ACTION, PROFESSOR SAYS
An environment professor at Dalhousie University says Canada’s push to lead the G7 into a war against plastic garbage would get a whole lot more heft if the federal government started enacting stronger policies at home.
Tony Walker says Canada is actually lagging behind many other countries, at least 40 of which have enacted some sort of national policy to curb the use of single-use plastic drink bottles, plates, straws and grocery bags.
In a new article published in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Walker argues Canada would be sending the right signals if it steps up with a national ban on plastic bags.
“I think they could send a message, a very strong message,” Walker told The Canadian Press.
Several small Canadian municipalities have banned plastic bags and Montreal became the first major city to do so in January. Victoria will follow suit in July. However, Walker says it’s too ad hoc of an approach and doesn’t encourage manufacturers to streamline their products to make for easier recycling. He also notes many attempts at the municipal level to enact bans in Canada and the U.S. have failed, including in Toronto in 2012.
Walker says he knows a ban is a heavy handed approach but in our “use once and then discard” mentality, we need to force people to think harder about what happens to their products of convenience.
He noted Canada banned the manufacture of microbead plastics already, deeming them to be toxic to human health or the environment, and will ban the sale of shower gels, face scrubs and toothpaste that contain them in June. Given that plastic bags and straws that end up in the ocean have been proven to be toxic for marine life, he wonders why Canada can’t use the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to do with plastic bags and bottles what it did with microbeads.
“I don’t know the mechanism how (a plastic bag ban) could occur but I hope they’re very forward thinking and progressive about this,” Walker says.
Last week Environment Minister Catherine McKenna was at the World Ocean Summit in Mexico, where she was pushing Canada’s desire to see the G7 nations sign a plastics charter, pledging to work towards 100 per cent recyclable, reusable or compostable packaging.
In a call with reporters she noted the equivalent of a dump truck full of plastic is dropped into the ocean every minute of every day, and at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. However, she did not cite federal bans on plastic bags as one of the steps the government is currently pursuing.