Don’t replace one throwaway with another

Re Start with plastic straws — and then go really big, Mallick, June 12 Canada has announced the phasing out of single-use plastics. That’s good.

What’s bad is that some companies are announcing their intentions to replace single-use plastic with singleuse wood. That’s replacing a fossil-fuelderived product with a product that could have been absorbing carbon as a tree.

The problem isn’t only single-use plastics, environmentally devastating as they are. The larger problem is companies mass-producing single-use products to be used once and discarded.

In Canada, a lack of safeguards around widespread industrial logging is causing caribou populations to plummet, weakening forests’ ability to store carbon, and clear-cutting traditional homelands of Indigenous Peoples.

In the U.S., the public is pushing companies like Procter and Gamble, which uses Canadian pulp, to commit to more recycled materials in their tissue products.

If Canada is to protect its forests, policies will need to prioritize truly reusable products, not just churning another resource into single-use trifles. Courtenay Lewis, Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington Heather Mallick gets the future with its reduced production of plastics while most climate change cynics don’t.

Because the times of increased global warming and increased pollution are our new reality, we need to act based on facts. Planned obsolescence to grow the industrial economy is no longer an intelligent design of products.

So perhaps it’s time to play a new game of learning to catch up with dramatic irony — where we the audience know more than the time-stamped characters.

Watch the 1967 coming-of-age movie, The Graduate, where the future is reduced to one word: “plastics.”

Now, half a century later, it’s time for a new coming-of-age mantra or meme: plastics is the past. Such a plasticity of mind should be our new way of framing realistic behaviour.

Those stingy economists who insist that little Canada delay acting on its own to reduce its puny pollution because larger, less-developed countries are not reducing their bigger waste need a lesson in ethics.

Morality is about doing the right thing for the right reason. It’s not meant to be co-dependent on the misbehaviour of others.

Canada should lead independently by example and not follow later, after being shamed for polluting and causing man-made climate change.

Now that we know better, we should do better. Time is not on our side. The growth of plastic clutter is clustering into world-wide garbage no-go zones. That is not our way to go into the future. Tony D’Andrea, Toronto Re Ottawa to ban ‘harmful’ single-use plastics as early as 2021, June 10 “It’s better to have incentives … (for) people to reduce their consumption,” Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer told reporters, dismissing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement as a mere “gesture” without a plan to accomplish anything.

The carbon tax is one of those incentives to reduce consumption. So why does Mr. Scheer campaign against it? Graeme Elliott, Toronto