Environment Committee on May 1st, 2019

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Mr. Thurlow or Mr. Burt, what sorts of things can the government do to incentivize innovation to spur this circular recycling of plastic goods?

[Michael Burt]

The big issue when it comes to the new recycling technologies that I've been alluding to—and just as an introduction to chemical recycling—there are basically two predominant technologies. One is gasification and another is pyrolysis. The advantage of these technologies is that they can take basically all plastic, including styrofoam, coloured plastic and multi-laminate. There are no emissions associated with them. It's high heat in a zero-oxygen environment. What you get out of the back end, depending on the technology, is a rough grade diesel methanol or ethanol. That can then be turned back into plastic.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

What can the government do to facilitate that?

[Michael Burt]

They always need start-up capital—capex—to get these facilities up and running. That's always the big hurdle and that's what you kind of need to do with government incentives. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste that I referred to—which is a very large fund—is looking at some of these start-up costs, which are really the hurdle to get into break-even economics.

The facilities are not very expensive. Obviously, they're highly scalable, but they're in the $10 million to $20 million range. You can get some of these up and running to handle basically all of the waste plastics in most municipalities. The capital investment is not very much, so the government's strategic innovation fund and other funding mechanisms are perfect opportunities. We'd like to see those expanded and more money put into them because there's a lot of opportunity coming forward.

McKinsey, a large consulting firm, put forward a paper about a year ago now—I can't remember—that talked about the fact that there is a 30—

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

I do have one minute and there was one question I wanted to get to.

I was told that one of the biggest problems with plastic recycling is the high level of contaminants in plastics—things such as the labelling and the painting on the labels of margarine containers, for example. What can be done to reduce the amount of contaminants, so that we can increase the level of recycling?

[Michael Burt]

On mechanical recycling is it difficult. Most of you may not be aware, but on mechanical recycling, basically most plastic has to be food grade. It all comes into contact with a beverage that you're drinking or it wraps your food. There are others that are not, but it needs to have highly stringent quality control.

When you get recycled flake, it's very difficult to get 100%. That's why a lot of the converters that we work with have to reach recycling content amounts, but the problem is that they sometimes—

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

What can be done? Should we just eliminate contaminants in plastic and ban—

[Michael Burt]

Chemical recycling will eliminate those contaminants.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Okay. Chemical recycling is the solution.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

Mr. Stetski.

[Wayne Stetski, NDP, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Thank you. We have an absolutely great group of witnesses here today.

Mr. Sandborn, I'd like to start with you. I'm from the Kootenay—Columbia riding in British Columbia. I was involved in managing provincial parks down on the coast for many years.

Have you looked at the source for the plastics currently in Haro Strait behind you? What's the number one thing that can be done to realize a better future? Have you sourced them at all? Do you know where they're coming from?

[Calvin Sandborn]

Yes. It's a very wide variety of plastics. The people who are cleaning up the beaches have a list of the common plastics that are on our beaches behind me. Those include things like food wrappers—that's one of the top things—plastic bottle caps, plastic beverage bottles, beverage cans and other plastic and foam. Straws and stirs were number seven, plastic bags were number eight, plastic grocery bags were number 10 and plastic lids were number 11. It's a wide variety of sources of plastic.

[Wayne Stetski, NDP, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

You listed seven ways to realize a better future. In the terms of the strait behind you, which do you think are the most important in realizing a better future there?

[Calvin Sandborn]

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.

[Wayne Stetski, NDP, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

How important is education in changing consumer behaviour, and who should take the lead on that, government or industry?

[Calvin Sandborn]

I think government needs to take the lead. In fact, I think the federal government could play a major role in educating people about the crisis we face. I'm increasingly struck by the children who are going on climate strike right now. These issues of climate—this is a climate issue as well—and plastics don't matter a lot to you and me. We'll only have to be around here for a few years to deal with it. My seven-year-old grandson will be dealing with those wildfires. He'll be dealing with the contamination of the Strait of Georgia and the microplastics in the shellfish.

It will get a whole lot worse, so it's very important that the federal government educate the public about the stakes of this and not just get led down the primrose path by corporations that say, oh, yes, it's a problem, but trust us; we've got a new solution.

[Wayne Stetski, NDP, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Ms. Rochman, you talked about microplastics in the air and microplastics in the water. What is the source of those, and how do we change that going forward?

[Chelsea Rochman]

I'll start with water. Here in Toronto, we've been sampling from some local plants. Our water is drawn from the Great Lakes, so the source of the microplastics in that water is simply the microplastics being in the lake. People also have sampled bottled water and have found microplastics in that bottled water. Some of that is actually from the PET cap. In groundwater, people find that there's much less.

I think it just depends on where you're actually getting your water from and where your water is stored. Also, then, we're trying to understand if anything is added during the treatment process.

For air, microplastics are found now to be prevalent in dust. I think some of this is the waste issue we're discussing, but some of it is just the fact that I'm sitting in a room with plastic chairs and plastic-made carpets. If the sun were shining in a window, I could see little dust particles floating around. The reality is that some of those are from the materials in the room. When we look at a certain type of instrument to tell what type of material it is, we see that some of those are microplastics. Because they're getting airborne, they are transporting atmospherically, like other chemicals.

That's why, when we think about solutions, we have to think about this whole circular economy and waste issue. For microplastics, some things are a bit unique, in that some of this just comes from the wear and tear of using the materials. Tire dust is another example of that.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

Thank you.

We're going to now move over to you, Ms. Dzerowicz, for your six minutes.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thanks to everyone for their excellent presentations.

We just came back from two weeks in our constituencies. I talked to a lot of schools. I will tell you that in the high school that I spoke at, there was a grade 12 student whose sister is in grade 9 and was in the library texting the questions to ask me, and they were all about plastic solutions and asking for immediate action on this. It sort of follows on the comment that Mr. Sandborn was making about a seven-year-old—but I'll tell you, this is a top-of-mind issue, particularly for students.

For a lot of my questions, I'm just hoping.... We're all trying to get to recommendations. We'd love to study this for a really long period of time, but we have a very limited number of sittings left. We really want to get to some solutions.

I'll think I'll start with you, Mr. Sandborn. You talked quite a bit about how places such as France and California and the European Union are doing a really great job in terms of limiting single-use plastics. I want to ask you whether or not there's been some data that shows progress and whether there are some underlying principles that drive their decisions around what single-use plastics to avoid. Do you have recommendations for us about where we start? Because I think we're looking to start somewhere, and I wonder if you might start off by answering some of those questions.

[Calvin Sandborn]

Sure. A number of these examples that I'm going to give are contained in our report.

California is an interesting example, because a number of local communities in California banned plastic shopping bags. After Napa County did that, they found that it reduced their marine pollution quite significantly. Then San José banned the plastic shopping bags. That worked out for a while and they found that it was reducing the amount of litter in their waterways and stormwater systems. Eventually, the entire state moved and passed the law.

It's pretty easy to just replace plastic shopping bags. We've done it here in Victoria. There's not a lot of real inconvenience. All you have to do is remember to bring your reusable bag to the store. You just put it on your doorknob for when you head out the door. It's just a change of habit.

Also, then, places such as Seattle moved to ban plastic straws, just because the straws are such an obvious waste, with such a short use, and they're thrown away. Seattle did that. Then the United Kingdom worked up to that, and the European Union is moving in that direction on a whole bunch of these single-use plastics in the near future. San Francisco moved to ban styrofoam food ware and that's worked out well.

The one thing that I think is a bit problematic is the reliance in the European Union on allowing so-called compostable plastics to be used. When places such as France banned disposable cutlery, they said that you could have compostable stuff. The technology of that I think has not lived up to the promise in many cases. People in Victoria have analyzed so-called compostable cutlery that is not composting in the composting facilities of the capital regional district.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you so much, Mr. Sandborn. I have a couple of more questions.

There is another thing that really bothers residents in my riding. I hold a lot of events, a lot of public consultations and transmitting of information publicly. They have asked me not to bring any more coffee cups from Tim Hortons, because they're not fully recyclable.

I guess I'll direct my question to Mr. Valiante. I think you were the one who commented that in the U.S. they have very ambitious targets around plastics and recycling of plastics and beverage plastics: 70% for all plastics and 90% for beverage plastics.

Is there something we can do at the national level that will get our companies moving towards producing something that will be recyclable so that I can continue to buy stuff at our local coffee shops that I'd like to support?

[Usman Valiante]

If we talk about coffee cups, and you create a regulation that says that coffee cups need to be collected and recycled at a rate of 85% or 90%, then the fast food outlet has a choice to make to meet that target. The coffee cup needs to be redesigned to make it recyclable to meet that recycling target. The system to collect the coffee cups needs to be established. Then at that point, they may look at the cost of that and say, “Well, maybe we need to move to an entirely different way to deliver coffee. Maybe we need to have some kind of reward system for a reusable coffee cup”.

By internalizing these costs today of being able to throw stuff away, you're now changing decisions that might be made. Therefore, I keep coming back to putting the obligation on the producer to collect and recycle their material at a high target. New opportunities will arise as they look at the cost of doing that and decide how they can either optimize what you've asked them to do or do something completely different that avoids the problem in the first place.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Who does that type of incentive work well right now, whether a country or not?

[Usman Valiante]

If you look at Canada, the jurisdiction for waste falls with the provinces and the federal government has powers under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. An analogy would be the European Union, where the European Union gets together and sets these targets for the member states, which then implement those targets through their individual policies.

The European Union is leading right now on these issues. It's gone through the process of ratifying a directive amongst its members that has these targets in it. The member states will then look at their own socio-economic realities and implement nation-state level policies to meet those targets. That will be a dialogue with the plastics manufacturers, the producers of products that use plastics, etc., about what the right regulatory structure is to meet those targets, but those targets are EU-wide. I would suggest that the same kinds of targets and definitions in Canada established at the national level would make producers' lives much easier because they would be able to harmonize their efforts across Canada.

A notional coffee cup recycling target that's established nationally would then have to be met by Tim Hortons in Saint John, Victoria and Nunavut. That would require making that effort to do that.