Indeed, Mr. Chair, I have introduced a bill that is in the next order of replenishment so it will be in front of the House for our deliberations. I may refer to it, particularly if you have questions about it, but I'll try to focus on the initiative and why I think it was important to this very important study that you're engaged in. Congratulations for taking this on now. I think the timing is excellent, given the momentum, as some of our friends here have talked about, not just within Canada but around the world.
The problem has been well stated. If we are able to recycle only 11% of plastics that go into the blue box, we have an identifiable problem. We have been running blue box recycling programs in this country for almost 40 years. This is a generation that has struggled—and I would argue, unsuccessfully struggled—at all levels of government to fulfill the promise of what it is when a Canadian buys a product, uses the product, and then seeks to recycle it, creating the circular economy that my friends have talked about. We are not fulfilling that promise right now.
Very specifically, what should the role of the federal government be? I think it's in setting the parameters and the rules. The federal government, I would argue, might not be well suited to start dipping into every recycling program within the country in every jurisdiction and every town and city, deciding what exactly their recycling program needs to look like, but we can certainly talk to industry and work with industry to set down the parameters of the products at the initial point of the plastic being manufactured. Because there are so many types of plastics available and so many are used for packaging, which is what my bill deals with, we don't have a consistent ability to promise Canadians that if they buy a certain product the odds of its getting recycled are very high.
We have also been relying—and my colleagues here would do a better job than I would—on foreign markets taking what we seek to recycle. That reality has shifted dramatically within the last number of years. With the recent changes in Chinese law and in some of the other receiving countries, Canada and Canadians can no longer rely on our recycled materials ending up somewhere else and being dealt with. Eighty-two per cent of Canadians want more done on this. As an active politician, though maybe not in the next round, I know the appeal of trying to get in front of issues and address issues that our constituents deeply care about.
From an economic point of view, we also have to realize that a successful and more efficient recycling program is very good for the economies of those countries that have been able to achieve much higher rates of recycling. I look to my friend from Toronto, and even with the issue of, say, contaminated plastics, which is about 25% or 26% of what happens in Toronto, for every 1% we take down—clean up the stream, if you will—we save Toronto taxpayers $1 million. With every 1% that we get better at what goes into those blue boxes and then ends up at the sorting centre, we can save that constituency $1million just in taxes.
The last time I appeared at committee was 14 years ago. I introduced a bill to ban phthalates, a plastic softener, out of products that were being given to children in Canada, because that particular chemical has an endocrine disruptor effect. That bill eventually passed unanimously in the House of Commons. What was important for me is that there was initial resistance from industry. I don't want to step on Mr. Masterson's toes, but there was a resistance saying that you can't replace or that replacements are worse. I think we need to be courageous in talking about how to make sure that everything that is manufactured can truly be recycled in this country and that promise is actually fulfilled. It is no one's fault but everybody's responsibility.
For those looking to pin the blame on industry, municipalities, the federal government or the consumer making choices alone, that's not correct. I put my recycling out on the curb this morning. I felt good doing it. I felt like it was the most natural and normal thing to do: go through the sorting, stand out there in the snow—which seems wrong on so many levels in mid-April—and then take it to the curb. Even though I've drawn up a private member's bill that I'm trying to introduce to make that process better, once I put it on the curb I thought my job was done. I feel like I ticked that box as a good Canadian citizen and that the plastic will go away and turn into something useful again, even though I've read the literature and come to realize that this process is not complete and the economy is not circular.
What can the federal government do? I think it's simply about understanding what is truly recyclable. I don't mean that it simply has the little triangle on the back with a number inside, but that it can be recycled legitimately in Canada. I think Mr. Masterson was referring to this at the end of his comments. Those plastics are what should be produced. Plastic packaging that can't be recycled, which is what I deal with, shouldn't be produced. I don't know why, given the plastic waste crisis that our first guest talked about, the plastic pollution crisis—I want to get the term correct—we would continue to say that it's acceptable that by the end of 2050 we will have more plastics in the ocean than fish, by weight.
It is, in fact, in its own way, an insidious circular economy. The plastics do come back to us. They don't come back to us in the form of products. We eat them; our children eat them. We consume them because they end up in the fish. They end up in the biosphere that we are a part of.
I want to be brief with my comments, because we have a lot of witnesses today.
I think that aspirations are good. I laud the current federal government for its aspirational statements of where we're getting to. We also need to have concrete promises to make that achievable, that we aspire to recycle this much by such-and-such a date. If we aren't fixing the upfront part of the problem, the production, and if we're not solidifying how to make sure that industry can work with us and then find a way to make sure that the promise is made complete, then they will remain aspirations. A future environment committee will be sitting here five or 10 years hence, on the eve of that deadline, and it will have to push the deadline off again because of whatever reasons/excuses may be available to it.
I want to end with this. I think that the statement on climate change, which this committee has spent a great deal of time on.... Right now, globally, 8% of all oil that we consume is used in the manufacturing of plastic. At our current rate of use, that will hit 20% of all oil produced in the world by 2050. It's both solution and problem, I would say, if one looks at it solely through a climate change lens.
Again, yet another argument for creating that truly circular economy when it comes to plastic is that single-use plastic, and the $150 billion of plastic waste that ends up in the oceans and in our landfills, is insidious. It's economically stupid, and it is going to cost us even more down the road.
I'll end there, Mr. Chair. I look forward to any questions folks might have about the bill or about any comments I have made today.
Thank you.