Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Heather Schoemaker. I'm with the National Zero Waste Council. I'm the director to the secretariat. I'm also with Metro Vancouver as a general manager. I'm joined here by my colleagues Joanne Gauci and Andrew Marr. They'll be introducing themselves shortly.
I'm going to give you a quick overview of the council and then we'll launch into the two areas of focus around plastics for the council.
The council is an initiative of Metro Vancouver, but it's a cross-sector leadership initiative that brings together businesses, governments and community sector stakeholders, all with the goal to advance waste prevention and a circular economy in Canada.
Founded in collaboration with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in 2013, the council has united, among others, six of Canada's largest metropolitan regions: Metro Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary and Edmonton. Those, of course, also include key businesses and government leaders, academia and non-profit organizations, all coming together to work for national action and systems change to address waste generation.
Of course, everything we do is framed on waste prevention, but foundational to all of our work is collaboration.
I'm going to hand it over to my colleagues to take on two areas that we're working on right now around plastics. Joanne Gauci is a policy coordinator with the council, and she'll be discussing work that we're doing through the Circular Economy Leadership Coalition around a plastics pact. Andrew Marr is the co-chair of our recently formed plastics advisory panel. He's also a director with the solid waste team at Metro Vancouver, and he'll be talking about the work of the panel.
Joanne.