Evidence of meeting #148 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was recycling.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Executive Director, Smart Prosperity Institute
The market will add them to the cost of the product through these tools, yes.
Consumers need to be activated and to be given choices. There's decent evidence that if they are given choices at comparable prices, they will choose the less wasteful.
Sorry, did you want to get in, Usman?
Usman Valiante Senior Policy Analyst, Corporate Policy Group, Smart Prosperity Institute
Yes, sorry, I haven't been able to talk.
Conservative
Larry Miller Conservative Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON
Okay, maybe I could ask you my next question, because I know I'm going to run out of time.
Mr. Delage, there is one thing I did want to say. You had a really good suggestion on windshield washer fluid. That is something practical. Actually, I was gassing up the other day and I needed some, and I was thinking, “Man, it would be nice if I could just refill that jug lying in the back of my car.” That's something I think we can work on.
Now, with respect to educating developing countries.... We see some of the images, on social media especially, of piles and piles of plastic in the water. I think we'd all agree that, with the odd exception in North America, most of it is in developing countries or whatever. Mr. Valiante, could you speak to that and to how we might address it? Is educating developing countries the only part of the equation?
Senior Policy Analyst, Corporate Policy Group, Smart Prosperity Institute
I think the way to address the plastic waste in developing countries is to use the same policy tools that you would use in Canada. We've talked about extended producer responsibility, which then puts the onus on manufacturers to collect and manage these materials and build the systems to do that. When we talk about developing countries, what we need to install there is the institutional capacity to administer these laws and regulations.
Certainly, with respect to the earlier discussion of what the federal government can do in Canada, the federal government can have a coordinating function with the provinces to establish these performance standards and measurement protocols. It can also play a role in registering producers and finding how much they're selling, so we can then measure how much we're collecting. Developing countries would benefit from those same rules we need in Canada.
I often say that some of our best exports from Canada are our institutions. How we write those laws and how we assist those countries in administering them is going to have a much greater effect than doing a one-off river cleanup. It's their ability to put these laws in place, which then allows the manufacturers to invest in the systems to clean the stuff up.
Mr. John Aldag (Cloverdale—Langley City, Lib.)
That's the end of the time.
We're going to jump to Wayne for the remainder. We have only about two minutes left.
I just wanted to say, Mr. Valiante, it's good to hear you. I know we had some problems, but we do have you on our witness list and we may be able to get you back for a full panel. I think you have a lot to offer us.
Mr. Stetski.
Kootenay—Columbia, NDP
Thank you for being here.
One of the things we're looking at, of course, is the scope of what we have time to look at over the next five or six weeks. There's the producer end of it; there's recycling; there's reusing and recovering plastics. I'm wondering if you can speak quickly to some of the innovation that you've seen around any aspect of that, and whether different sectors of the economy are looking at different innovations for their sector. For example, medical plastics would be different from textile plastics, so can you tell us whether the industry as a whole is trying to move forward? Should we be calling for witnesses to speak to some of those?
What have you seen that's new and innovative at the different levels?
Senior Policy Analyst, Corporate Policy Group, Smart Prosperity Institute
I think the innovation that's happening is in the systems to collect materials and the systems to recycle them. The officials from Environment Canada mentioned 80 core players in the Canadian market that are recycling plastics. They're bringing new technologies to bear on recycling plastics, and some very innovative stuff in the chemical and mechanical recycling of plastics.
What they suffer from is that they don't have the skill right now to operate commercially. They can't get a supply of recycled plastics—plastics to actually recycle—and there's no demand for what they're producing, because what they produce competes with virgin plastic resins made from fossil fuels, which are very cheap today.
What we can do is bring these policies in place—the extended producer responsibility and the recycled content rules—which will allow them to commercialize and scale these recycling technologies. Canada has a very sophisticated petrochemical sector. The plastics recycling sector is a subsector of the petrochemical industry. We have technologies to produce green plastics—that's producing plastics from carbon capture. All of those things need scaling, and scaling is going to come from these policies, to create a supply of recycled plastics and a demand for green plastics, whether recycled or produced from renewable chemistry.
I think the committee would benefit dramatically from hearing about some of these innovations that are occurring, what the barriers are in the market economy today, and what the federal and provincial governments can do to set a new trajectory for the plastics economy, which is going to grow. We should be deriving all of the economic benefit, but without the waste. There are some key policy interventions that Mike described—they're in our paper—that will set us on that trajectory.
Executive Director, Smart Prosperity Institute
They really are amazing technologies that are ready to reach scale, and in want of the right policy signals to pull them through the system.
Mr. John Aldag (Cloverdale—Langley City, Lib.)
Wayne, sorry, I'm going to have to jump in. We're at the end of the time we have, so we'll wrap it up here today.
Thank you so much.
Abbotsford, CPC
Chair, I just have one point.
Mr. Wilson talked about six points. He got through three of them and had to really rush through four, five and six. Are they all in there?
Executive Director, Smart Prosperity Institute
They're all described in there.
Mr. John Aldag (Cloverdale—Langley City, Lib.)
We'll get a copy.
Thanks, everybody. This is the first session. As I said, we'll pick it up on Wednesday and hear more, to help us understand where we may want to go.
The meeting is adjourned.