Recycling blues

Re: Banning straws isn’t going to save the ocean, Tristin Hopper, July 20 While I agree with the author’s overall stance that banning straws is not enough to curb our plastic pollution crisis, I firmly disagree with his claim that recycling is working and that countries in Asia and Africa are largely to blame for allowing plastics to trash our oceans and landscapes.

Canada has been shipping plastic waste to places like Vietnam, India, the Philippines and (until recently) China for processing, meaning some of the plastics that flow into the sea from those regions could very well be from us.

In Canada we discard millions of single-use plastic items every week. Research shows that in Canada, only 10 to 12 per cent of our plastics are recycled. The rest ends up in landfill, incinerated, or in the environment to pollute drinking water and wildlife habitats. That doesn’t sound like a system that works. Municipalities are struggling to keep recycling viable in a climate where contamination, confusion and misinformation about what can or can’t be recycled clogs their systems. Considering the high quantities of plastics being produced, recycling is simply not enough.

In order to tackle this problem with action that matches the scale of the crisis, we need governments to legislate bans on single-use plastics that are used for seconds and that can pollute for centuries. We also need the corporations that operate worldwide to take full responsibility for their plastic footprint and move away from using throwaway packaging and products in favour of reusable options. Farrah Khan, Campaigner, Arctic + Plastics, Greenpeace Canada