Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Peter Vinall, and I'm the president of Sustane Technologies. This morning I'm joined by Kevin Cameron, our senior vice-president of business development.
Thanks for giving us the opportunity to speak to you today about how Sustane is uniquely positioned to assist the horticulture sector in meeting the government's climate change goals through the reduction of plastics waste and the use of society's organics as a negative carbon fertilizer.
We were founded in 2014, and we're based in Halifax. Sustane is a Canadian clean-tech company, and we're on a mission to improve waste circularity, materially reduce greenhouse gas emissions and have a global impact with our solutions.
Every year Canadians throw away over 2.5 million tonnes of plastic waste. Only 9% of plastic is actually recycled in Canada and North America, and the rest ends up in landfills and in the environment, threatening our health, wildlife, rivers, lakes and oceans.
Certain kinds of plastics can be replaced with biodegradable alternatives. Single-use plastics, however, play a critical role in health care and food safety, among other things. For example, the horticultural sector needs to use plastics to transport goods to markets. While there's a desire to reduce the sector's carbon footprint, there are very few cost-effective or viable alternatives in production, distribution and transportation.
That's where our sustainable solution comes in. At Sustane, we're focused on improving waste circularity by repurposing single-use and end-of-life plastics back into a plastic precursor. We can take end-of-life plastic and put it back into the plastic food chain, so to speak.
Through our proprietary mechanized process, we're able to recycle up to 90% of landfill-destined waste into plastic precursors and negative carbon fertilizer, replacing the current high-carbon processes. We're already doing that in Nova Scotia at our full-scale demonstration plant in Chester, where, in addition to municipal solid waste, we also process plastic from the federal government's ghost gear cleanup program and agricultural waste from farmers.
Just last month we signed an agreement with Wetaskiwin County in Alberta to build a facility there, which will also process some of their agricultural waste, improving the carbon footprint of farming in the province.
We've also signed a memorandum of understanding with Washington state, and we're planning our expansion into the United States.
At a community level, our innovative approach to use waste management reduces a municipality's carbon footprint by up to 10% through the prevention of up to three tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions for every tonne of waste that we would process.
Mr. Chair, Sustane believes that industry needs to be responsible in the use of plastics, but that government must also recognize that for many processes, plastics are the only economically viable material for the immediate future. If the government truly wants to support our agriculture sector, it should be funding circular economy projects that can process horticultural waste and support extended producer responsibility programs to fight climate change.
We should also be working to support the sector through the adoption of new technologies as they become available. Canada has the opportunity to lead on agricultural sustainability by investing in solutions that promote waste circularity. Canada can not only achieve its climate goals without punitive measures on industry but can also help bring forward a mature, made-in-Canada technology that's in high demand around the world.
Thanks again for the opportunity for us to appear. We're more than happy to answer any questions you might have. I hope you have the opportunity to visit our Chester plant in Nova Scotia to see our cutting-edge technology in action.
Thank you very much.