MAKE PLASTIC WASTE A BURNING ISSUE.

Having utterly failed after more than 30 years of trying to shut down the production of fossil fuels, without which our civilization could not survive, the global green industrial complex has found an alternative target: plastics.

Plastics, a product of fossil fuels, are among humanity’s greatest life-enhancing inventions. But today, backed by Canada and other nations, a global green movement has unleashed a barrage of anti-plastics nonsense around the idea that plastic waste is killing the oceans and wreaking massive environmental damage across the planet. Starbucks, desperate these days for some good PR, raced to embraced the idiocy, announcing this week its stores would eliminate all plastic straws by 2020.

And Environment Canada, under Minister Catherine Mckenna, has set up “Moving Canada toward zero plastic waste,” a website allegedly to consult with Canadians, who are asked to share their ideas. “We can eliminate plastic waste and reduce marine litter in Canada,” it promises. Since Canada’s contribution to plastic waste in the oceans is essentially zero, this is another classic green pander to manufactured ignorance.

At last month’s G7 meeting, Canada pushed for approval of an Ocean Plastics Charter, although only five nations signed on to its non-binding feel-good reuse-and-recycle commitments. It’s like the non-binding Paris agreement on carbon, but for plastics, Mckenna said. The minister has become a tweeting machine in support of the charter and various Canadian initiatives — municipal plastic-straw bans, plastic-bag recycling — as amazing initiatives that will somehow save the world and the oceans.

But what, exactly, is the scale of the oceans-plastics “crisis” that straw bans are intended to resolve? What is Canada’s role as a global polluter? And what are the proposed solutions to whatever problems do exist?

Scientific estimates are a bit uncertain, but one number in current use is that eight million metric tonnes (MMT) of plastic waste reaches the oceans every year, a number that will quadruple to 32 MMT by 2050 if nothing is done. The number is large, but it’s significance as a pollution factor tends to be exaggerated by activists, scaremongers and viral-video auteurs filming fish and birds wallowing and dying in plastic waste.

But 32 million metric tonnes is, quite literally, a drop in the oceans. Weight also has no relevance. It’s volume that should count. According to one measurement site, 130 kilograms of plastic waste is equal to one cubic metre of waste by volume. It follows that one metric tonne of waste equals approximately seven cubic metres by volume. Therefore, 32 million metric tonnes of plastic waste — the amount forecast to be dumped into the oceans in 2050 — amounts to 240-million cubic metres.

That seems like a lot, and it is — unless you’re talking about oceans, which are estimated to contain 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water. I’m no mathematician, but my number crunching suggests that 240 million cubic metres of waste is equal to 0.24 cubic kilometres. In 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of ocean, that’s something like 0.00000002 per cent of ocean mass. Or, as a mathematician might say, approximately zero per cent.

If the objective is to reduce plastic pollution, the first thing is to recognize the national sources of ocean plastic pollution, which are not Canada or the United States.

One commonly used ranking of top-20 plastic polluters listed China at the top, with annual mismanagement of 8.8 million metric tonnes, followed by Indonesia (3.2 MMT), Philippines, (1.8 MMT), Vietnam (1.8 MMT), Sri Lanka (1.6 MMT) and on down to the 20th on the list, the United States with 0.28 MMT. Canada does not rank.

When a writer for The Guardian reported last week that she encountered plastic garbage while snorkelling off the coast of Indonesia, that wasn’t Canadian garbage. Asia is ground zero for gross waste mismanagement. For Canada to be launching plastic-straw bans in Winnipeg and other points thousands of kilometres from the oceans is based on rote adherence to the dubious ideals of the green radicals who are driving the anti-plastic movement.

Of course, this is not to imply that the oceans — or land — should be used as random plastic dumps by anyone. So what is to be done?

Mikko Paunio, a Finnish doctor and adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki, has some advice. In a recent paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Paunio dismisses the reduce-reuse-recycle mantra embedded in the Ocean Plastics Charter.

The charter, in self-important sustainability jargon, calls for “100 per cent reusable, recyclable or, where viable alternatives do not exist, recoverable, plastics by 2030”— objectives that Paunio describes as “the mirage of a circular economy.”

His solution for plastic waste? Burn it.

At least seven nations operate highly effective waste incineration systems, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan. The EU nations on the list “now landfill less than three per cent of their municipal solid waste.”

In Canada, the idea of burning waste has been fought by green activists and self-interested corporations for decades. Federal, provincial and municipal officials tend to run scared when confronted by activists and rent seekers pursuing the ideological “mirage of the circular economy” in which everything gets recycled or reused.

In Ontario, for example, the province’s recently ousted Liberal government declared itself dedicated to “Building the Circular Economy.” New incineration proposals failed in Brampton and Ottawa.

Toronto became a no-incinerator zone under former David Miller before he moved on to head up the World Wildlife Fund of Canada.

With a new premier, Ontario, and the rest of Canada, have the opportunity to bring in new waste-management philosophies and strategies. It is time to make waste, especially plastic waste, a burning issue.