Don’t expect Trudeau to do anything about plastics

One of my favourite new terms is “virtue signalling.” It means a statement or act primarily designed to show how sensitive or morally superior the person making it is.

With Canada taking over the presidency of the G7 international economic group on Jan. 1, expect a year of virtue signalling from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, particularly on plastic trash in our oceans.

And as with nearly all virtue signalling, expect Trudeau’s blather to be more about shining his environmental apple than about doing anything meaningful to keep six-pack rings, water bottles and shopping bags out of the world’s seas.

Unlike climate change, which as a problem is largely overrated, there is a real concern about plastics litter in our oceans. You may have heard claims that there will be more plastics than fish in our oceans in 30 years or that the equivalent of a garbage truck full of plastics is dumped in the oceans every minute.

I can’t say whether either of those is accurate. Environmentalists love to paint such dramatic pictures the way Hollywood producers love to make movies “based on real events.” But reliable estimates place annual marine-plastics litter at somewhere between five million and eight million metric tonnes. And it takes years to decompose.

That’s a lot of fish-snaring, turtle-trapping, gull-choking plastic. Governments around the world are right to want to stop it.

But here is the one and only thing you need to know about plastics pollution to help you decide whether the PM is serious about the problem or not : According to a thorough study, released before Christmas by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, 90 per cent of plastics pollution in the world’s oceans comes from just 10 rivers.

Eight of those rivers are in Asia (including five in China). The other two are in Africa. Not one is in Europe or North America.

In other words, if Trudeau is truly serious about tackling plastics litter, he will have to hit hard at China, India (the second-largest ocean polluter) and the African countries of Egypt and Nigeria.

But my guess is, being the master virtue-signaller he is, Trudeau instead will concentrate on banning plastic bags at convenience stores in Barrie, Ont.

When a ban on single-use plastic bags went into effect in Montreal at New Year’s, Trudeau’s environment minister, Catherine McKenna, positively gushed about the achievement.

Never mind that both paper bags and reusable plastic bags produce more carbon emissions than single-use plastics in their manufacturing. A reusable plastic bag, for instance, has to be used 130 times to be more emission-efficient.

And ignore the fact that both paper bags and reusables spread more bacteria (although that’s something you might want to contemplate when you’re carrying your family’s food home in one). A University of Arizona study showed half of reusable bags contained measurable amounts of bacteria, including E. coli.

Banning the single-use plastic bag has become a fashionable symbol of how much we care about the environment and sea creatures. Every parent of an elementary school-age child has been told from the back seat how the bag they just stuffed the fixings for tonight’s supper into will kill some endangered sea creature or other, because “teacher says.”

The owner of an Edmonton eco-products store has begun a petition to get the city’s virtue-signalling council to ban plastic bags.

To get to an ocean, a plastic bag discarded in Edmonton would have to travel nearly 2,400 kilometres through a series of rivers and lakes, being lucky enough in each to find the proper inflow and outflow, until it finally reached Hudson’s Bay.

But expect Canada’s presidency of the G7 to mark the Year of Inconveniencing Canadians with Meaningless Action on Plastic.

Lorne Gunter is a Postmedia columnist with The Edmonton Sun, where this first appeared.