City’s role in easing out plastic straws, packaging vital

In a perfect world, small cities like Peterborough could force big corporations and institutions to do the right thing and ban throwaway plastic items like straws and Styrofoam containers.

But they can’t, so congratulations to Coun. Gary Baldwin for accepting that his proposed ban was too ambitious and tempering it into an education program.

Now the challenge will be to develop a public education program with the best chance of changing the outlook of both companies and corporations and individual citizens.

The need is obvious. Plastic bags, plastic straws, those Styrofoam containers so many burgers and fries come in — far too little of it gets recycled.

And current research shows that even recycling isn’t as planet-friendly as we once thought. Neither are “compostable” plastics that may break down into ... tiny bits of plastic so small they can be found in the bloodstreams of animals and humans.

On Monday night, city council left it up to City Hall staff to report back on the best ways to convince Peterborough it can be a bigger part of the solution.

The first need will be to figure out who is already doing that work.

The city is on that list. So are Peterborough GreenUP, various Trent University student and faculty-led groups and any number of other organizations, small and large.

The members of For Our Grandchildren, who recently got the city to start taking tax-deductible donations for a fund that would back projects to mitigate climate change, will have good ideas.

Peterborough Public Health, which already gets $1.5 million in funding from city taxpayers and specializes in developing education programs, would have a role to play.

The city’s most effective role might be helping coordinate what is already happening, give it a sharper focus and higher profile.

Those efforts would be directed both at individual users and the companies and institutions that have built throwaway plastics into their daily practices.

On the retail side in particular those two segments have a built-in link that can be worked effectively — consumer/customer to seller/provider.

Once people are more aware of how many billions of plastic drinking straws are thrown away every year and the toll they take they can be convinced to avoid using them, and to seek out businesses that ban them or switch to some other form of straws.

Hospitals and nursing homes are also heavy straw users.

Then there are plastic bags.

The five cent charge for bags that most grocery stores and some retailers have adopted generally cuts bag use by 70 per cent, research has shown.

Not to pick on any one company, but when Walmart introduced the nickel fee on bags it said it has 1.2 customers a day nationwide. If only a third of them buy one bag each that generates roughly $7.5 million annually.

It apparently isn’t possible to force companies to spend that money on environmental projects. Most do contribute some of it.

An education program could also focus on more transparency over how much revenue goes to those projects, and ask: Why not more?

The evidence for using less plastic, not just in “throwaway” items but in all containers, is overwhelming.

A lot is already happening here to focus attention on the entire “plastic chain.” Having the city step up its effort can only help.