John, thanks very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, we appreciate being here today to talk about a subject that I assure you is very near and dear to PAC Packaging Consortium's heart.
Let me give you a little snapshot of who we are. We were founded in 1950 as the Packaging Association of Canada. We're a small not-for-profit corporation. Our member base and our corporate members include companies, government, academic institutions and individuals. We have 325 corporate members across the country. We go into the U.S. for membership as well. We have over 2,000 associates.
Or core mandate is to educate, advocate, collaborate and celebrate all safe and sustainable packaging materials and the associated systems. The key word there is “all” packaging. We're not here representing glass or plastic or fibre. We're here to speak on behalf of all packaging today.
We have a very small management team of less than 10 people, full time and part time.
I'm going to flash through our 10 minutes really quickly.
We don't like to think just about plastics and the plastics issue. We're really focused on all things to do with waste. What we mean by that, really, is that there are many non-plastic packaging materials that exist today and are recyclable and/or contain recycled content, but the recovery rates are low.
The single message I want to give you is that things that are already made of 100% recycled material and are collected at curbside are still not being recovered. As an example, folding cartons—cereal boxes—have very low rates in that regard. In fact, they're quite low compared to PET plastic and HDPE plastic. That's what our chart on this slide will quickly show you.
The problem of increasing recycling rates is systematic, including the package design, the consumer behaviour—all of us are consumers, and I call consumers the forgotten stakeholders—recovery and the recycling processes themselves.
The next slide is about plastics and how important they are in terms of the value chain. I'm not going to talk about the economic value of plastics because that has probably been addressed already, but in terms of packaging when it comes to food, what that symbolically tells you is that packaging zucchini takes you from one day on the shelf to five. Packaging of mangoes takes you from 20 days to 40. Fresh swordfish takes you from seven days to 12.
When you think about this in the environmental footprint context and holistically, and you associate everything else with that, packaging has a tremendous role, especially plastics packaging, in terms of the protection of food, and of course there is a great protection of all other products associated with that as well. Without packaging, quite simply, waste and the associated costs would skyrocket. Of course, education is vital to everybody, especially the influencers.
The next slide shows the core issues on our mind with regard to increased recovery of all packaging and plastics. There is a huge cost disparity between going into landfill and recycling. Recycling is a very expensive proposition, and it's a big issue. Package design and innovation are of course critical, because we have to be thinking about that at the front end of the process. We need to be thinking about that, and in our world we call that the “SEEscape design process”, where we think about it as circular. When we sit down and design something, we want to think about what's going to happen to it when it goes off into its next life as well.
A really critical issue is that of confused and disengaged consumers. That's a big one. Again, it's the forgotten stakeholder. Even packaging experts are very challenged when we get into this discussion.
As for what I want to say here about upgrading recovery facilities and reprocessing challenges, think about this: digital technology is incompatible with analog technology. In the world we live in, where we're seeing packaging design going on and we think it's cutting edge, we don't see the same kind of investment in the back end and the recovery end. That has to be in harmony. Otherwise.... This is a system. It's not just “design it right and the problem will go away”. That's not going to happen. Costs will come down when volume levels increase, so it's a question of scale as well.
What are we doing about it as an industry? The current slide shows you that the significant organizations in the world today that are in consumer packaged goods are really paying attention to this. They all have 2025 commitments with recovery, recycling, reusability.
I was in Walmart in Bentonville about three weeks ago. It was celebrating with a thousand people in the room. It called its initiative “Project Gigaton”. Project Gigaton talks about all things to do with the environment, but a key component is packaging. All of those other companies that you see there on that slide are suppliers to Walmart. What retailers do is that they help to drive the value chain and bring their supply chain along with it, so all of the major actors are involved.
The thing that's important about this, and I want you to understand this, is that global actors are designing for global markets, not just Canada. We shouldn't just be looking for a made in Canada solution. That's an important one. There is a very small market for these global companies, and we're part of it.
There's a huge knowledge, communication and motivation gap between the large organizations that I believe are doing it right, and the small, medium and offshore organizations that walk in your front door with the next greenest package in the world and who, if they haven't done their research, they don't have that capability. They don't have the skills set to talk that way. There's a big gap between what these big powerful organizations are doing and the smaller organizations.
What's PAC doing about it? We're publishing white papers on ocean plastics. The Ocean Wise folks have been in and we collaborated with them on this. We have packaging sustainability checklists that are design guides for people designing packaging. We've got our packaging innovation gateway. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in a couple of minutes. We have educational courses on package circularity.
We partner with CCME and we consult. I'm actually the vice-chair of the National Zero Waste Council from British Columbia, which has been before you. We're working with the City of Toronto on a pretty cool project. We're also heavily engaged with the Conference on Canadian Stewardship.
This is a typical event. By the way, I've given a lot of brochures and information about us to the clerk. There is one for May 30. It's an example of people we're bringing in to talk about disruptive innovation in plastics and packaging. All of our speakers are coming in from the U.S., such as Tom Szaky. If you haven't heard of Tom Szaky, he wasn't actually born in Canada but raised in Canada and now lives in the U.S. But look up Google Loop. It's an amazing initiative.
We've got people who are coming in who are piloting the separation of post-consumer polypropene and they're taking that back. They're turning it back into pure flakes, so it can be used in packing again.
We've got WestRock coming in, one of the largest fibre companies in the world that is now taking in coffee cups, which have been the evil packages of all time to recover and recycle. It's now taking them to eight mills. It's collecting them in eight cities in the U.S. at curbside, and it is taking them back and turning them into good products. The coffee cup solution is there, and we're going to be talking about that in Toronto on May 30.
We're looking at how government can help us. Stronger governance. We want to be part of the solution. We don't want just to be perceived as part of the problem.
When you form committees, don't just call us in like this. Have us sitting on that side of the table with you, so that we can help to collaborate and facilitate solutions. Harmonized policies are absolutely vital to success. Without harmonization across the country, we're not going to get to zero waste, so that we can communicate from province to province, municipality to municipality, and a consistent message to consumers.
Endorse a process that we're going to be starting very soon with the City of Toronto where we want to be a gatekeeper to help screen packages coming into the system. Drive investment. Help us with investments in recycling, in the back end, because that's a big area and big issue. Landfill bans are a big problem.
I have one more thing.