LET’S BAN PLASTIC BAGS
Montreal has an opportunity to position itself as forward-thinking on the environment, Liz Miller says.
Is a debate over plastic bags a trivial pursuit or a chance to take the lead as the first large Canadian city willing to make a small sacrifice for a larger cause?
Plastic bags are helpful in a pinch — on a dog walk or a quick run to the store — but they are spoilers in the long run. They clog drains and flood basements, end up in waterways and landfills, and, because they never fully decompose, tiny plastic particles become floating homes for microbes that are thriving in the middle of our oceans — in the plastisphere, an ecosystem we have unwittingly created by producing too much plastic.
Mayor Denis Coderre is offering a unique opportunity to examine our relationship with plastic. Now is the time to support a full ban on plastic bags in Montreal.
In a class I teach on food and film at Concordia University, I ask my students to map the journey of food items in their refrigerator, and to research each item’s country of origin, miles travelled and mode of transportation to the fridge. Montreal’s public consultation on plastic bags is prompting me to rethink the assignment and instead focus on the journey of the garbage in a trash can.
It is estimated that Quebecers use one billion plastic bags per year and more than 500 billion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. Where does all this plastic go?
To find out, visiting your local landfill is a great way to face your waste. BFI Canada landfill in Lachenaie (Terrebonne) is where most of Montreal’s plastic bags end up. The amount of plastic in our city is staggering. And sadly, it doesn’t just disappear.
To complicate matters, most of us don’t fully understand the dif- ference between regular, biodegradable and compostable plastic and how we should dispose of each kind of bag. Regular degradable plastic does break down, sometimes as small as a piece of sand, but it doesn’t go away and becomes the building blocks for those unnerving microbe floating homes in oceans.
Biodegradable plastic is a misleading category because, while it may eventually become organic matter, it’s not clear how long this takes and how to recycle it. Compostable plastic usually breaks down, but it depends on where the bag is trashed. Compost Montreal, for example, an organic waste collection service, can handle these bags, but smaller composts cannot. It’s confusing, and while we don’t have entirely clear guidelines or systems for dealing with the disposal of plastic bags, our consumption rages on.
Is convenience a strong enough argument to ignore the obvious? It’s time to let go of plastic bags.
Beyond the local landfill, our plastic bags can end up in faraway places. They travel primarily through waterways.
I’ve just started a multi-year research project on shorelines around the world and, it turns out, plastic travels as much as we do. At this rate, your favourite beach might just become an unexpected trash dump. An increase in severe weather events is exacerbating the problem. Geologist Orin Pilkey, in The Last Beach, describes how the Japanese tsunami disaster of 2011 swept five million tons of debris out to sea, some of which was then carried across the Pacific by ocean currents and winds.
The ultimate symbol of plastic waste is perhaps the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of plastic garbage the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean. And plastic is not just drifting on the high seas; micro particles may also end up on your plate. As plastic bags break down in smaller particles, fish, birds, mammals and turtles mistake them for food and are dying as a result.
Recently, while filming a segment on sea-level rise in Guna Yala, an archipelago off the coast of Panama, I discovered that the locals are less worried about rising sea levels than they are about the volume of trash that is lapping onto their shores. The community has enough challenges managing its own trash. Plastic is safely out of sight and out of mind until you realize that we are actually destroying the shorelines we love and those of our global neighbours.
I understand that eliminating plastic bags is not a top priority for Quebec food retailers. They are concerned with a new government regulation that gives them until 2020 to figure out a way to deal responsibly with the organic waste they generate. But rather than ranking environmental initiatives as trivial or competing priorities, let’s reimagine this as a public education effort and a chance to let vendors know that we can adapt.
Our liquor commission, the SAQ, banned plastic bags in 2008 and liquor sales are steady. They have offered a seven-year rehearsal period for all of us to figure out how we might live without plastic bags. A few local grocers provide used boxes in the front of the store for customers who forgot a canvas bag but want to avoid plastic. In 2008, Huntingdon became the first municipality in Quebec to institute a ban on plastic bags, and a year later, Deux-Montagnes followed suit. After a bit of grumbling, it appears that residents survived the shift.
As Quebec’s largest city, Montreal can take a stand on a relatively simple issue and catch up with inspiring initiatives around the world. Rwanda, Eritrea and Somaliland are 10 years ahead of us — in 2006, they banned nonbiodegradable bags. Bangladesh, Burma and Thailand have all banned plastic bags because they were clogging up drains and causing massive flooding. San Francisco recently banned the sale of plastic water bottles.
The public consultation on plastic bags is on. Montreal can position itself as a forward-thinking city. This issue is anything but trivial. It’s a relatively small step forward with a potentially huge long-term payoff.
Plastic is not just drifting on the high seas; micro particles may also end up on your plate.