Thank you.
The plastics advisory panel that I co-chair is made up of local governments across Canada. From that local government perspective, we've been developing a list of what we consider to be priority plastics, ones that have a particularly significant impact on the environment, specifically oceans, and also on local government operations, things like litter, illegal dumping and even sewage treatment.
We've also been focusing on short- and medium-term actions, essentially the quick wins that may exist.
We've brought along a few select examples that illustrate the range of actions that we're going to be looking at and the range of the types of plastics the panel is considering.
The first example is prohibitions. These can be bans; they can be mandatory requirements for substitution of a different material for plastic, or they can be a mandatory redesign of a product. The example that we put up here is the cigarette butt. The cigarette butt is a type of plastic. It's made of cellulose acetate. It is not biodegradable per se. It's also the most littered item in the world. Somewhere around four or five trillion cigarette butts are littered in the world every year. It's essentially a non-essential item. The World Health Organization confirms there is no health benefit to a cigarette filter, and that it's essentially just a marketing tool.
Another example of the type of action we're looking at is harmonized EPR. As you have probably already heard, extended producer responsibility makes the manufacturers of products financially and legally responsible once they become waste. It differs drastically by province, and within municipalities there are efforts as well. We're suggesting that packaging EPR should be harmonized across Canada, preferably at the highest level, not the lowest common denominator. We recognize at this time there is no federal mechanism to require or to enforce provincial harmonization of EPR programs for packaging, but the federal government could, for example, incentivize formation of interprovincial agreements.
Next is non-traditional EPR. Traditional EPR makes the manufacturers responsible for handling the material after it becomes waste, but that doesn't help you if the pollution from that product occurs from its regular use and not from the disposal of the material. For example, recycling of clothing doesn't address the fact that synthetic fibres shed many plastic microfibres from regular washing and laundering of clothing. In this particular case, one of the suggestions we're coming up with—and it's controversial even within our panel—is that manufacturers of textile synthetic fibres could be required to contribute toward the increased cost of sewage treatment or, for example, toward the redesign of washing machines to include filtration systems to reduce the number of plastic microfibres.
The last example is mandated research and development. Some plastic items have no clear solution yet. An example is tires. Just like textiles, the particles that are released from tires happen from their normal use. The wear and tear of a tire loses up to 20% of the weight of the tire. Those particles go into the environment. They are washed off into streams and rivers and so on. You can't ban the automotive tire; there's no realistic alternative to it, so we're suggesting that in this particular case, the industry should be mandated to carry out research and development for better materials, surface water treatment and other options, recognizing that while there are no solutions, no solutions will be found unless somebody is looking for them.
I'll turn it over to Joanne.