Finding new solutions

By the end of 2021, the federal government plans to ban several kinds of single-use plastics in Canada.

Provincial and municipal jurisdictions are already banning single-use plastic bags, but the federal law would include straws, stir-sticks, plastic cutlery and food takeout containers made from hard-to-recycle plastics as well.

But even as the federal government takes aim at plastic materials, there have been unsettling revelations about whether the plastics industry has used the ability of plastics to be recycled as a Trojan horse to sell more of the material.

Essentially, by labelling a series of different plastics as recyclable through a variety of different means, the industry has hidden the fact that many plastics are impossible to cost-effectively or profitably process.

You feel good because you diligently collect plastics with recyclable symbols, without the knowledge that many of them won’t actually find their way into a new product.

So, you might ask, why bother?

Simple: a shrug of the shoulders and an easy and convenient dismissal of recycling efforts is not enough.

Something has to be done about plastic, and if recycling isn’t a good enough solution, we should be focusing on ways to improve how we deal with it.

Microplastic particles are showing up worldwide — in fact, not only are they being found everywhere humans are, they’re also being found in places where humans are not.

In the snows of the high Arctic — on isolated mountain tops, wafted aloft by winds — in great spinning gyres far out in the world’s oceans.

Larger plastics are found in the deepest parts of our seas and on otherwise untouched coral atolls — they travel more easily than any living, breathing human.

The jury’s out on how damaging those plastics are, whether you breathe them in or eat them along with your dinner of filter-feeding ocean life like mussels. But the fact is, they are there, and they are steadily increasing. They harm wildlife, so it only makes sense they’re not inert in us, either.

The temptation might be to just pile it in the trash and argue, “recycling isn’t working anyway.” (There’s even a risk that those concerns could get incorrectly conflated with more successful metal and paper recycling.) That just means you can’t be bothered to be part of searching for a better way. There will always be people seeking a convenient excuse for their laziness.

If we need a better way, let’s find it. Start by using less plastic and reusing what you can. Push governments — both federal and provincial — to legislate plastics out of sections of the marketplace.

A federal study found that, even with the systems now in place, 29,000 tonnes of plastic waste ended up as litter in 2016 alone — we need to be finding ways to halt the growth of plastics, not justifications for continuing to take part in its path