Town of Pictou voices support to ban plastic film

Pictou town council will be sending its support for a ban on plastic film.

Following a presentation to council by Pictou County Solid Waste during its committee of the whole meeting Monday, it approved a recommendation that a letter of support to the Nova Scotia government in favour of a province-wide ban on film plastics.

Plastic film includes those indicated by #2 and #4 and include items such as shopping bags, overwrap (such as toilet paper packaging), pallet wrap, frozen vegetable bags/soil bags; it also includes the blue bags used for recycling. Nova Scotians use 300 million to 500 million shopping bags annually. Plastic film is banned from all seven provincial landfills in Nova Scotia.

This winter, Halifax Regional Municipality has run out of storage room for the product so the province has allowed it to put plastics in landfills for six months which will give it time to come up with a more province-wide permanent solution.

Plastic film collected in Pictou County goes to the recycling facility in Kemptown which MacDonald said is facing similar issues. She said the Kemptown site handles 407,255 plastic bags a day.

The ideal option would be to have the province legislate a ban on plastic bags such as those used for shopping or groceries, she said.

The second option is to have people pay for the use of plastic bags at checkouts which has had some success in other provinces and reduced bag use by 50 per cent.

Voluntary participation is the third option which goes hand-inhand with educating the public on using something other than plastic to take their groceries or shopping goods home in.