Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
First, I must thank you for inviting me, even though I had not much time to prepare. I have been working in the waste management field in Quebec for more than 25 years. During the 1990s, I began work with the Front commun québécois pour une gestion écologique des déchets. I apologise for the long, name, but, at the moment, it is the only one we have.
I am going to talk to you about waste management. I work in a community, not-for-profit organization. So I have nothing to sell you except ideas, that I take this opportunity to share with you, and that I hope you will appreciate. To go straight to the heart of the issue, the greenhouse gas issue, I will say that three main areas cause harmful effects: transportation, consumption, and urban development. In urban development, I include house construction, road construction and even store construction. Everyone wants their lawnmower and their drill so that they can mow the lawn on a Saturday morning and do renovations. It all has a major effect on our environment and on greenhouse gases.
If you take one thing from my presentation—which may be the most boring one you have to hear—it is that we have to stop working in isolation. We cannot just talk about waste management, development, transportation and biomass as separate issues. Everything is linked. I work in waste management, but that is directly linked with consumption and the extraction of natural resources. By the way, extracting natural resources accounts for 20% of the emissions of greenhouse gases, GHGs. GHGs are directly linked to our current consumption in North America.
I am sure that you are all aware of Earth Overshoot Day, which fell on August 1 this year. It was talked about a lot this year. The date means that, on August 1, we had already consumed all the resources produced by the planet. That is to say that, since that date, for about for five months, we have been living on credit. We consume resources that took Earth thousands of years to produce. If the planet as a whole consumed exactly what Canadians consume, we would need three planets. In other words, we really are living beyond our means. As I mentioned, in terms of the environment, we are living on credit.
It means that we really have to shift our paradigms. I don't want to frighten anyone, but continuing to consume natural resources as we are currently doing, and imagining that we can create growth indefinitely, is a fantasy. It's mathematically and physically impossible. We really have to change the way we go about things. That does not mean revolution or choosing what is known as degrowth. There are ways that people will perhaps find simpler and more acceptable.
When I say that we have to move forward intelligently, which is perhaps a little strong, I mean that we have to do so with a real concern for reducing our impact on the environment. For example, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by fossil energy, some are promoting the production of energy from waste, from left-over material. That means producing energy with incinerators. In our view, that makes no sense. To produce energy like that, we would actually be burning plastic, paper and other combustible materials that otherwise would be recyclable and could eventually be reduced. That is not an optimal way of dealing with the material, with the supposed goal of improving the way we do things.
The electric car is a specific example. Some groups, including some environmental groups, are quite hesitant about it. If we are producing energy from coal-fired plants, I am not sure that there are really any environmental gains. We must also understand that, with electric cars, we are only shifting the environmental impact as we extract rare minerals in order to design and build them. Clearly, using them creates much less impact on the environment. They are much more energy-efficient because they require much less energy to move. The fact remains that they are not a panacea. We have to look at all the problems rather more holistically. As I was saying earlier, we have to stop working in isolation.
If we focus strictly on leftover material, on waste, the content of garbage cans, we must work on what happens next. We must make sure that the leftover material we produce causes as little impact as possible on the environment. That is waste management.
However, we certainly also have to work on previous stages, with producers. In our view, producers are responsible for goods not only when they put them on the market, but also when they design them, when they think about putting them on the market, when they produce them, when they are used, and at the end of their life when they have been consumed. Producers therefore should be made responsible
For decades, there have been a lot of voluntary approaches on this planet; they do not work. So we feel that we really have to have what we call “extended responsibilities” on the part of producers. This means that producers are responsible to recover their goods and process them with no impact on the environment, or with the least impact possible. This also means producing goods that we need. Let’s forget disposable goods and goods that we do not need. We have to have consumer goods that include a proportion of recycled material and, eventually, goods that are also re-usable and recyclable.
We must be careful when we say that things are recyclable. That does not mean that they will be recycled. Unfortunately, we have the bad habit of saying that a product is recyclable, even though it is not recycled. We do not actually have the facilities, and, between you and me, everything is recyclable. A nuclear power plant is recyclable. It may take millions of years but eventually nature will recycle it. Our planet Earth does not need to be saved, it will outlive us. Our problem is more about our own survival. So we have to stop having this fantasy belief that, if something is recyclable, it is good for the planet. There are recyclable goods that cause a lot of problems with contamination and even with greenhouse gas emissions.
Once we have worked upstream with producers and with consumer goods, we have to take care of the downstream problems. After the waste, the leftover material, is produced, what do we do with it? If we are talking strictly about greenhouse gases, leftover material actually does produce them. Decomposing material produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is found especially in sanitary landfills, or lieux d’enfouissement techniques, as we call them in Quebec.
We absolutely have to divert organic matter from disposal sites so that methane is not produced. We probably have two options. The first would be to move to separate collections, one picking up organic matter, another for green waste, and another for table waste. The second option would be to process it by composting or biomethanization. Both approaches are possible, depending on the region, meaning whether the setting is urban or semi-urban. Both technologies, both methods, are pretty good. The idea is to prevent the production of greenhouse gases.
We must also be careful when we talk about other materials that put greenhouse gases into the environment. As I have said, everything recyclable is not necessarily recycled. We really have to focus on the 3 Rs. As well as recycling, we have to reduce at the source, meaning not consuming or producing goods, and we have to reuse them. For example, in Quebec, we have reusable beer bottles. This is a very good way of avoiding greenhouse gases and of not having to produce a widely used product. That is not just the case in Quebec; I believe that the bottles are recyclable wherever beer is drunk.
The government must also set an example. That means that it has to encourage recycling, and have legislation and incentives, so that companies are required to have a minimum recyclable content. I say that although I dread to do so, because it sounds very preachy, and the last thing that someone working with the environment must do is to preach. However, you were elected and you have enormous influence. You are the decision-makers, in fact.
So, on the table behind me are some recyclable and eventually disposable products, the single-use products for the refreshments. Thank you for them, it is very kind of you. But it is the kind of detail that says, yes, we believe in it and we think about it, but we are not doing anything specific about it that needs to be done. If you want people to believe you and to support you, you have to pay attention to that kind of detail.
I have been working in Québec for 25 years. I am happy to come to Ottawa for discussions. We do not have enough opportunity to exchange views with people in other provinces. We each have our methods and our ways of doing things, especially in waste management, which is in provincial jurisdiction. But we all have the same problem. We would all gain by sharing our experiences and our successes.
On that note, Mr. Chair, I thank you very much.