You'll see behind me the Strait of Georgia, the Haro Strait, which contains an amazing amount of plastic. The latest studies show that any cubic metre of sea water out of that strait typically has over 3,000 particles of microplastic.
I understand that in Ottawa today, you have rising waters there too. As you'll discover shortly, there is a connection between those waters behind you and next to you that are rising and the plastic crisis that we face.
The Environmental Law Centre at the University of Victoria has been working for a couple of years on the plastic issue because it's rising to the magnitude of climate change and is very directly related to climate change. We know that internationally there's a tsunami of plastic, eight to 20 million tonnes of plastic every year going into the oceans. It's plastic bottles and bottle caps, plastic bags, straws and stirrers, styrofoam cups, food containers and food wrappers, plastic microfibres and balloons, fishing gear—a very important thing, plastic fishing gear—and strapping bands from shipping.
This plastic is having the impacts that many people have heard about. We know that over a million seabirds a year die. You may have seen the tragic documentary ALBATROSS about the albatross in the middle of the Pacific that are dying because their stomachs are full of plastics. We know that every year there are 100,000 mammals—seals, sea lions, dolphins and whales—that are dying from plastic pollution, and countless fish.
We know the stories about the turtles that mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, eat them, and die. We know about the herons and gulls that are strangled by six-pack rings of plastic. We know about the seals and dolphins that get entangled in plastic bags and drowned. We've all read the stories about the whales that have pound after pound of plastic in their systems, and about whales actually dying as their guts burst from the plastic load in their guts.
For those of us Canadians in cities, however, there's a more subtle problem, referred to by the previous witness, which is the microplastic problem, the large amounts of microfibres in the Great Lakes; the fact that most bottled water that gets tested has microplastics in it, the fact that an international study of sea salt found that there was only one sample that didn't have microplastics in the sea salt. As I mentioned about the Strait of Georgia behind me, Haro Strait, there are 3,000 particles of plastic in every cubic metre, and over 7,000 particles of microplastics up in Queen Charlotte Sound, at the north end of Vancouver Island.
This all strikes home when we look at the recent studies that have been done on Vancouver Island, where every shellfish that was tested in a recent study had microplastic particles in the shellfish, which are being consumed by Canadians. The average, in one study, showed eight particles of microplastic in the average shellfish in British Columbia.
So it's a problem, and it's a problem that is going to get worse if parliamentarians do not do their job.
We know that it's a problem that is increasing; that the production of plastic has doubled in the world in the last 20 years and is projected to double again. There's been a Royal Society study that projects that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
Perhaps the most concerning issue is the issue that I mentioned about the floods that are outside the doors of Parliament, the drought on the campus here at UVic, and the wildfires that happened in the last two summers consecutively in British Columbia, where it was kind of like an apocalyptic movie to live in Vancouver or Victoria, as extensive wildfires created a scene where you could not see the sun because of the smoke, and people's health was severely compromised because of climate change.
Eight per cent of oil and gas production in the world goes to plastic production, and 20% of global oil production will be devoted to plastics by 2050. All for what?
Ninety-five percent of plastic value is used for a few minutes, and then disposed of. When the Government of France moved to limit plastic tableware and disposable plastics, they made the statement that it doesn't make sense to use an item for a few minutes and then wait for centuries for it to break down.
We have this throw-away society that we need to address. We're digging up the oil sands and causing a lot of environmental destruction there in order to produce disposable cups and plastic straws. Millions of plastic straws a day are disposed of in North America by McDonald's. Somebody uses a straw for maybe 15 minutes, and then it goes into the environment or landfill. Plastic is also used at Starbucks, where instead of having a reusable cup, people have a cup with a plastic lid that they use even when they're having coffee “For here." Look around at Starbucks the next time you go there. It's filled with people who are using plastic lids that are totally unnecessary.
In your offices, look at the Keurig machine and the mountains of these little Keurig coffee pods that are used and wasted every day.
There are solutions to this, and we've laid out the solutions in our papers, which have been supplied to the committee. There are seven reforms to address marine plastic pollution, and there is a blueprint for federal action on plastics. The solutions are basically to ban certain types of single-use plastics, to follow the example of the European Union, France, the states of California and New York, and the City of San Francisco, and to start banning things like plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic water bottles, styrofoam cups and disposable cutlery.
Deposit refund systems can be used. University cafeterias already use them. People have plates that they pay a deposit on. They use the plate, and instead of having a disposable plate, they take it back and get a refund. Deposit refund systems have worked well for pop bottles.
Regulation of stormwater outfalls has to happen. We should look at the U.S. Clean Water Act, where they've set “zero” limits on plastic in stormwater flows, and places like Los Angeles that require that companies put in attachment inserts to ensure that the plastic that gets disposed of on land doesn't flow into the ocean, because that's the route; all this terrestrial garbage eventually finds its way to the ocean.
We need to regulate microplastics as the government has already done with microbeads. Another very important thing is that the plastic fishing nets create ghost fishing gear that endlessly kills and wastes fish, so you have all these fishing nets and old crab traps that are still in the water out there. They're designed to kill. They kill the fish and the crabs, and it's wasted. Nobody ever consumes it. In Washington State, in Puget Sound, just south of us here, they've had great programs giving federal money to indigenous groups to recover those nets and get that plastic removed that's doing damage in the oceans.
More fundamentally, we have to do things to deal with the problems of extended producer responsibility to make sure that manufacturers of plastic take responsibility for their plastic. Manufacturers of plastic should be paying for some of these measures like stormwater modifications. Costco should take back the packaging and deal with it, instead of having taxpayers pay for it.
The much more fundamental thing is that we have to look at what's happening in the European Union with the circular economy initiatives, and we have to start developing our own plan for a circular economy, a new plastics economy, that is focused more on reduction and reuse than recycling. I say so because I know that the plastics industry people are going to come to you and say, “Well, we'll enhance recycling programs,” but recycling doesn't generally work that well. Less than 10% of all the plastic produced ever gets recycled. You have situations where Keurig coffee says they have coffee pods that are recyclable now. It gives consumers an excuse to use more of the these Keurig coffee pods.
I commend to you the Toronto solid waste department's report on how that's causing great damage to the Toronto solid waste recycling program, because the things are not recyclable, because they're contaminating the plastic stream. You have a company saying that this is recyclable so people will feel okay about purchasing this product, yet it's not working. There are numerous examples of recycling not working.
How much time do I have, Mr. Chairman?