Council backs education campaign

Peterborough won’t be pursuing an outright ban on straws, other throwaway plastics

There will likely be a new campaign in Peterborough within six months to reduce the use of plastic such as drinking straws, plastic bags and Styrofoam containers.

City councillors gave preliminary approval to the plan at a committee meeting Monday night. Now it needs to be ratified at a forthcoming city council meeting.

Coun. Gary Baldwin proposed the move on Monday.

Although he thought perhaps an outright ban on disposable plastic would be a good idea, he said, he spoke with staff and decided that a public awareness campaign might be the way to go.

Coun. Stephen Wright wanted to add to the motion that local merchants who charge five cents for plastic bags be made to donate it to the city’s new Climate Action Plan fund; that’s a new fund that receives citizens’ donations to put toward green projects in the city.

But Cynthia Fletcher, the city’s new commissioner of infrastructure and planning services, said she didn’t know of any mechanism to compel merchants to donate to a fund.

Baldwin said that although he appreciated Wright’s enthusiasm, he’d rather not have that addition to his motion.

“I’d like this particular motion to be clean and clear,” he said, before Wright agreed to remove the addition.

Mayor Diane Therrien said she was happy to support the motion.

“I think this is a really good step,” she said.

Coun. Kemi Akapo agreed: “Climate change is real — and it’s happening more rapidly than any of us quite understand.”

Evelyn Robertson, 21, who studies environmental resource science at Trent University, was in the gallery on Monday and following the meeting she told The Examiner she thought council made a good move.

“Definitely we need to be focusing on single-use plastics,” she said. “It’s a step in the right direction.”