Thank you for the opportunity to express the views of the new Dow as the committee considers its study on plastic waste.
My name is Michael Burt. I'm the vice-president and global director for climate and energy policy. I'm joined by my colleague Scott Thurlow, who is an expert on the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
Dow is one of the world's leading resin producers, so our interest in the committee work is obvious. Dow takes its responsibility as a leading plastics producer very seriously, which is why we are actively leading and engaged in several plastics sustainability initiatives around the world.
In Canada, Dow manufactures the building blocks for advanced polymers and plastic materials. Our sites in Alberta draw from hydrocarbons to make ethylene, polyethylene, electricity, ethylene glycol and ethylene oxide. We have just over 1,000 employees across the country and over 40,000 employees worldwide.
Plastics have helped improve living standards, hygiene and nutrition around the world, especially in developing countries. Rapid increases in income and prosperity have brought many of the conveniences of modern life. It is also worth noting that most recent advances in medicine, avionics and aerospace are due to advanced plastics. They are literally saving our lives.
Plastic disposal has become a global environmental challenge, but it isn't the only environmental challenge. In fact, plastics are a solution to other challenges that we continue to face. As the Prime Minister said just last week, the environmental challenges are deeply interwoven with one another.
Moving away from plastics to alternative materials increases energy consumption by at least two times, GHG emissions by at least three times, and overall environmental costs by four times, and that is before considering food wastage, which carries the heaviest social cost and carbon footprint. As an example, the reason why cucumbers are wrapped in plastic is that they last five times as long on the store shelf. Without the plastic, we are going to have a lot more food wastage.
Our global CEO, Jim Fitterling, has been an instrumental leader in a new industry-wide effort called the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. This, with Dow as a founding member, launched in January of this year. The alliance is a not-for-profit organization partnering with the finance community, government and civil society, including environmental and economic development NGOs.
We're working to make the dream of a world without plastic waste a reality. We have a strong team composed of the world's top minds from across the entire plastics value chain. The non-profit currently has 35 members, but we see it expanding to over 300 members. The alliance has already committed more than $1.5 billion over the next five years towards attacking plastic pollution from a variety of angles, from waste cleanup to investing in technologies, technological advances and recycling and recovery.
We're urging everyone in industry to start investing in technologies around chemical recycling, which is different from traditional mechanical recycling that grinds down plastic bottles into materials, typically flaked, for reuse. Certainly, where a product can be used a second or third time, we encourage that.
Not all products have the same use more than once. For those products, we turn to chemical recycling. Chemical recycling uses chemistry to turn previously unrecyclable plastics into feedstocks and fuels to be used again in the production of clothing, bottles and everyday products.
Our CEO has been clear: “If we can do chemical recycling back to feedstocks and [eventually] back to plastics” instead of tapping another oil and gas well, “that opens up a whole range of impacts on climate possibilities that people haven't thought about.”
Our mission is to end plastic waste. We need to focus these resources to have the greatest impact. It is through increasing the scale of that alliance that we can better focus all our resources. We need to focus governments on the circular economy investments. Canada has many programs in place that can be focused on these types of sustainable investments. For example, Export Development Canada, the Business Development Bank, Sustainable Development Technology Canada and others can see this circularity embedded into their mandates.
What is Dow doing to tackle these problems directly?
In December, you heard from my colleague about the company-wide initiative that helps collect, sort and reduce the amount of hard-to-recycle plastics going to landfills and gets them into the natural environment: the Hefty EnergyBag program founded by Dow. This program is emblematic of what is needed to make it work—partners. We need partners in place who can support industry-led initiatives. We intend to launch an EnergyBag initiative in Canada this year.
Another company example is that Dow has constructed two private roads in Texas using over 2,700 kilograms of recovered plastic. In other words, that is the equivalent of 120,000 grocery bags. We solved one environmental problem by locking that used plastic into a different use. We have helped other jurisdictions accomplish similar results.
Dow is also a founding member of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, which collaborates with packaging converters and brand owners to increase production of stand-up pouches that can be recycled through existing polyethylene film recycling streams. Dow's “RecycleReady” technology enables manufacturers to develop packaging that can be qualified for the Sustainable Packaging Coalition's “How2Recycle” label. This increases demand for more recyclable package options. Packages made from RecycleReady technology can be recycled via polyethylene recycling streams such as the grocery store drop-off system in the United States.
As another step, Dow is also driving the development of new commercial recycling business models and growth strategies to monetize plastic waste recycling streams globally.
Finally, we have also invested into the $100 million endowment for Circulate Capital. This incubator will finance companies and infrastructure to help capture and recapture the value of plastics. This is a key role for private industry to create the very partners we need to deal with the actual problem: increasing the amount of product that is recaptured and subsequently returned to the economy.
Dow recently announced a partnership, driven by the World Economic Forum and called the Global Plastic Action Partnership, to bring experts together to collaborate on solving plastic pollution. This partnership is initially funded by the Governments of Canada and the U.K., along with Dow and several global brands, with the objective to have investable localized solutions in place by 2020. It is our sincere hope that these local solutions can be adapted and implemented in other countries. The first project is a collaboration with the Government of Indonesia.
In conclusion, let me state a few things clearly for the record. We do not believe that any plastics should be released into the environment. We are strong supporters of improved plastic waste collection. We see the waste of plastic as a loss of resource. The very future that makes plastic so attractive for packaging and the so-called single-use plastics is the very future that leads to its disposal: it is inexpensive.
As far as recommendations go, first and foremost, we urge the committee to not finalize its recommendations till the CCME has completed its work. This issue is one that requires multiple levels of governments to agree on a path forward. For example, haphazard plastic bans will most directly affect the poorest Canadians, who will see the price of food increase due to waste, spoilage and increased fuel costs arising from more trips to carry the amount of food or heavier loads.
Second, we need to see the value of these plastics and treat used plastics as a resource instead of a waste. This is how we can get plastics out of the environment. It will prevent all global citizens from tossing away these valuable substances. Recycling targets for new content are one way to assist in this goal. As you have heard from the CIAC, the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada, it has already made pledges in this regard. Ultimately, the world needs to continue to benefit from these plastics while limiting the environmental downside of these materials.
Finally, we recommend that this committee follow its own recommendations from the review of CEPA tabled two years ago. The committee recommended “that Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada adopt a life-cycle approach to assessing and managing substances under CEPA.”
In conclusion, projections are that plastic packaging is expected to quadruple in use by 2050. We believe that something else beyond just mechanical recycling needs to be utilized in order to have any chance to reach the new aggressive zero-waste goals. Mechanical recycling alone will not get you to 100% diversion of plastics from landfill, and it will not get us to full circularity of plastics. We believe that this “something else” is chemical recycling via energy recovery conversion technologies.
I thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I would welcome any questions later.