Thank you very much for this opportunity, and thank you for looking at the issue of plastics.
My name is Mark Butler. I'm the policy director with the Ecology Action Centre, in Halifax. With me is Vito Buonsante, who is with Environmental Defence. Both of our groups are members of the Green Budget Coalition, which has 22 members. The Green Budget Coalition—I hope you've already met them—provides recommendations on an annual basis for the budget.
Both Vito and I have provided the clerk with briefs. We'll just grab some highlights from our presentations so there's enough time for questions.
I understand that your focus is on the role of the federal government and what it can do to address the plastics crisis. We appreciate that. I'm going to provide some comments on the role of science, ocean plastic, and reduction and recycling. I'm going to try to illustrate a couple of my points through short stories.
I'll start with our own organization, founded in 1971. One of the first things we did was go out and buy a cube van and go around and pick up newsprint. At that time, it was considered slightly “out there,” and I'm sure people thought we were a bunch of crazy hippies. Today it's a big industry. It's providing jobs and it's a widespread activity. The point is that some of the things we might now think are “out there,” like going to the supermarket and not finding single-use plastics or using refillable containers, could in five years' time become more common in response to the crisis we're facing.
I've been involved in quite a few beach cleanups, and probably you have too. Your local communities have probably engaged in cleanups of beaches, rivers or roadsides. It's often surprising and impressive how much plastic—and most of it is plastic—that you can pick up on a short stretch of beach. If you extrapolate that to the entire Nova Scotian or Canadian coastline, it's just boggling to think how much garbage and plastic is out there in the environment.
However, for me, being a little older, what is most shocking is that, when you come back the next year with a well-intentioned group of volunteers—grandmothers and boy scouts—to clean up that beach again, there's a whole new batch of plastic. I guess my point here is that we need to turn off the tap. We need to reduce the amount of plastic we're producing and putting into the environment.
Max mentioned fishing gear as a source of plastic in the oceans. I would be happy to talk about that, and I'd also like to address an interesting initiative in Nova Scotia around EPR and fishing gear.
Another thing I noticed as I was doing beach cleanups is that when you pick up a piece of plastic right on the edge of the beach and you put it in the bag, it's fine. But if you go into the woods, you find the older plastic, and if you try to pick up a shopping bag or another piece of plastic, it disintegrates into hundreds of little pieces. That is precisely the problem we are facing and that science is starting to illuminate the whole issue of microplastics. Really, you could think about a plastic bag or any piece of plastic as an oil spill or a toxic spill in slow motion.
In terms of a role for the federal government, I think it's important to emphasize that science is central to this. I don't think it needs large amounts of funding, but we need to keep investing in science, keep understanding what is going on with microplastics. We need to address the issue Max identified around the attachment of certain chemicals to microplastics and their impacts on human health. I'll mention a short scientific study that looked at sea salt and found that 19 out of 20 brands had microplastics in them. So the problem is serious, and it's serious for human health.
I have one last point. Reduction is important, but we will still end up using plastics. The plastics we do use, however, we need to be able to recycle. In Atlantic Canada, because of our distance from central Canada where a lot of the recycling facilities are, we need to get together and look at how we can develop a local recycling capacity. As we know, China has said no, so there's now an opportunity to develop a domestic recycling capacity here in Canada.
I'll turn it over Vito.