Thank you, Heather.
In terms of our work broadly, to nest the work that we're doing in plastics, which there is a lot of at the moment, the council facilitates knowledge sharing broadly; has a number of member-led working groups, including one on product design and packaging, and has strategic initiatives and a growing network of partners.
As Heather mentioned, we are going to focus our comments on two key areas. We're going to share reflections on how to advance a circular economy for plastics, garnered through recent engagements we have done with the Circular Economy Leadership Coalition, to explore potential for a plastics pact in Canada. I emphasize that this work is supported by ECCC. We have not formally reported out, so these are very much high-level observations. Then we'll speak specifically to some actions that are being developed through the plastics advisory panel of the council.
As already mentioned, plastics is an area of high priority and attention. Citizens and consumers are concerned with plastic waste and are pushing governments and businesses to transform their policies and practices.
Global efforts to address plastic are developing rapidly. Countries, companies, NGOs and communities are embracing global commitments and targets. We are seeing a rise of national responses in the form of voluntary agreements or pacts that mobilize business and other stakeholders around a shared vision and set of targets.
Leading examples include—and some of these are probably familiar to you—the UK Plastics Pact, a French plastics pact and a Dutch plastics pact. There are many others in development. These pacts are instructive in terms of aligning actors within a national context in support of a common vision and set of targets. It's within this context that the CELC has completed the outreach and engagement activities to explore the potential for a plastics pact in Canada, which would be similar to what's been developed in the U.K.
We're still collating these findings, but it would appear from our preliminary analysis that there is high-level support for a pact in Canada. That would be a pre-competitive business platform to support dialogue, action and innovation that is tailored to the Canadian context and strengths but has linkages to the global and national commitments and ambition on zero plastic waste and the circular economy.
If developed similar to the one in the U.K., a pact would have a focus on packaging with four target areas: eliminating problematic or unnecessary single-use packaging; designing packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable; effective reuse, recycling and composting; and a target on average recycled content.
These are just some of the preliminary findings. We would be happy to share more on that work as we move forward.
Right now, I'll hand things over to Andrew to talk about the advisory panel.