I think it's this idea of moving to a circular economy and not being mesmerized by this chimera of recycling. Now we have this new chemical recycling that will be the answer so that we can continue to be as wasteful as we have been over the last few decades. The real solution will be if we put a priority here on reduction and reuse as opposed to recycling, which is the standard paradigm. The priorities for responsible waste reduction are to reduce and reuse things before you get to recycling. I'm afraid, if we are captured by this promise of, oh, now we'll move from less than 10% recycling to 100% recycling, and we'll be able to do it with chemicals, that we will continue to sit in Starbucks and have everybody in Starbucks with unnecessary plastic lids on their cups for their “for here” coffee. We will continue to have hundreds of millions of straws used at McDonald's for 10 minutes and then tossed away. We will continue to have our offices filled with Keurig machines that have no real advantage over a Bodum. They're no more convenient. If you wanted to properly recycle them, you'd have to clean out the pods just as you have to clean out the Bodum.
I think we have to fundamentally think about the throwaway society we have and recognize that maybe we should go back to what our grandparents did. My granddad used to take his coffee in a thermos. He used it for years and years. My grandmother had a bag she used over and over again to get groceries. That's where we need to focus. I'm very concerned that we're going to be diverted by corporations that have their own financial interests as their priority and that we'll say, oh, we can continue to live as we are and then we'll recycle at the end; there will be a technological fix for this.
In fact, one of the things the federal government could do that would be the most valuable would be to change the misleading advertising legislation under the Competition Bureau legislation and make sure that all of these companies that are promising to be green are actually telling the truth about their recyclability of products. Test it and make sure that some of these programs are valid as opposed to just providing enough advertising to assuage the conscience of consumers who don't want to buy a non-sustainable product.