Environment Committee on May 13th, 2019

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

One of the difficulties I see with adding plastics to the schedule 1 list is that there are so many different substances: polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polystyrene, nylon, polyesters, rubber, polycarbonate, malonic anhydride—I worked in plastics for a long time—and so in some cases, if you think about polyethylene, there may be some applications of it that you would want to eliminate. We've all seen the pictures of ducks trapped with the little polyethylene rings around them, but on the other hand that plastic is also used for in all of the intravenous tubes and the syringes in hospitals in a lot of medical applications.

Is there a way of putting them in with plastics in a specific application, maybe by doing a similar thing that Europe did when they looked at the different beaches? Have they looked to see the most commonly occurring type of plastic pollution?

[Nancy Hamzawi]

If I understand your question correctly, in that scenario you would be looking at a schedule 1 listing of plastic waste versus plastics. I'm not a lawyer, but should our state of science assessment, as we gather information, lead us to that place, then plastic waste, as I understand it, is a potential listing option.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

I think it will be important because with some of the plastics used in cars and different technologies to make them lighter, while you may want to prevent their getting into the oceans, there may be other uses for them that you don't want to prevent.

It's interesting that my colleague mentioned incineration, because I was going to talk about Japan and their use of clean-burning incineration. They don't have a lot of space there for one thing, but another thing in the recycling is that you don't really get 100% of the return. Do you think that putting good incineration technology in place across Canada would help this problem?

[Helen Ryan]

Currently some energy from waste happens in Canada. We approach things from the hierarchy of waste generally, so we're trying to make sure that we recover the maximum value and economic opportunity from it. But then there may be circumstances where, because of the nature of the material, there's also a place for energy recovery and to be able to use that.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

When I was growing up there were a lot of publicity campaigns against littering. The culture at the time was that if somebody else saw someone throw something away, there would be outrage. I think we've drifted away from that as a society. Do you think there is a place for a public awareness campaign to encourage correct behaviour to prevent things from getting into the ground and stormwater in the first place?

[Helen Ryan]

Yes. One of the targeted areas of the charter, in addition to the national strategy, is education and awareness to ensure that people understand the implications and also to seek their help to clean up the material that's found there. I think from both perspectives this is important.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Has there been a lot of discussion about the alternatives when you take out single-use plastic? If you think about the sandwich bags when people take their lunch and that sort of thing, well, they could use plastic containers, but if you're trying to eliminate all plastic, then maybe that's not helpful. Sometimes there is not a good alternative other than glass, which has its own problems associated with it. Has there been much discussion about what the replacements will be?

[Helen Ryan]

Again, that's one of the areas that people are looking at to identify the viable alternatives. In addition, there's been funding put forward for the domestic innovation challenges to look at some of these potential alternatives so that they find their place with the $12 million invested there.

As an aside, I just came from a colloquium at Université Laval. One of the products that was put forth by a design graduate was a reusable equivalent of a zip lock bag. I think we're seeing innovation in this area and we'll continue to see it. There will continue to be work on what these alternatives can be.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

My other question has to do with municipal and provincial regulations. We have some provinces that have things in place and we have some municipalities that have started, and they're not all aligned in the same direction. When the federal government decides what actions it will take and goes through the listing, how do you see those things falling into line if their regulations were in place before the federal ones?

[Helen Ryan]

As I mentioned, we're working with provinces and territories in the development of the action plan to support the Canada-wide strategy on zero plastic waste. In there, we look at the areas of action that are needed across the spectrum, including municipalities, provinces, industries and individuals. I think it's collectively looking at what's needed and then looking to see how we advance that.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Great. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

Perfect.

Ms. Dzerowicz, over to you.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thanks so much for coming back. It's been really interesting to listen to all the testimony, and I really like the fact that there have been some recurring themes.

Following up where Mr. Bossio and Ms. Gladu were going, I think one of the top recommendations is adding some sort of plastic to schedule 1 of CEPA, but how do we do it? Do we do it as plastic? Do we do it as a subset of plastic? Do we do it as plastic waste? Like, what is it that we'd make the recommendation on? I wonder if you could provide a little more clarity on this. I'm not a scientist, to be honest, and I want to be as effective as possible, but I don't want to eliminate the use of....

If we classify “plastic”, does that mean you can't use medical devices that are plastic if we put that under schedule 1 of CEPA? Or does that just allow us to do testing and various different things where it gives us the option to do a whole bunch of things and doesn't mean we are automatically banning anything? I'm wondering if you could clarify that very quickly.

[Helen Ryan]

By adding plastics or a subset of plastics to the list of schedule 1, it allows us to gain access to our CEPA authorities. Our CEPA authorities, as I mentioned, are broad, and can cover essentially the life cycle of the material. Then it's a question of looking at what action is warranted in order to get at the risk that's been identified to the environment or to human health; to develop a risk management measure that's targeted to that; and then specifically to undertake the evaluation with respect to that in terms of putting forward a proposed risk management measure.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

One of the other recommendations was around national standards. I think we heard fairly consistently that it's something we can do at the federal level that would be very helpful. To be clear, are these national standards for what plastic can be created or what plastic can be recycled? What would be a useful recommendation at the federal level for national standards and plastics?

[Helen Ryan]

If you look in our Canada-wide strategy on zero plastic waste, you'll see that one of the areas that was identified was the need to have more consistency, and standards is one of the areas that's talked about.

When we talk about those things, we can talk about issues like recycled content and others, and you can set standards working with standard-setting bodies. Standards are often set through a collaborative approach with industry—for instance, the Standards Council of Canada, where they come together and define what's needed. There are opportunities to move forward in that kind of a context. That's just meant to be illustrative. They could also be product standards around how a product is designed, how it is disposed of and whether you're able to repair it, or the durability of it. Those are all kinds of areas where you could have standards.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Okay, that's helpful.

When we're talking about national standards, I know there are different numbers. We could also help to define what those are. They have to be 1, 2, 5 or 7 to be able to be recycled, so we could also establish that at the national level. I'm just throwing those out there. Thank you.

One of the other things that had come up is around measurement, how we start measuring progress and how we measure, I think, different parts of progress. Would there be any recommendations or thoughts around the type of data that would be useful for us to start gathering, so that we can actually start making some progress around reducing plastics pollution?

[Helen Ryan]

Some of the information that's come forward from Deloitte's study, in which they started to identify the areas where plastics are used and the nature of the sector, helps to give us a better understanding of the kinds of information that are important to our being able to monitor and measure progress. In addition, Stats Canada does do surveys. They're done roughly every two years, so there's information that's collected and put forward by Stats Canada that also helps us to get a better understanding of the nature of the issue and the areas that we should target.

I'll turn it over to my colleague Jacinthe Seguin to elaborate.

[Jacinthe Seguin]

You did very well. It's nearly all covered.

Indeed, Stats Can is really kind of our baseline, and that is who we'll be turning to in order to measure some of the overall progress when we look at how much is disposed and how much is recycled. We're going to be also, hopefully, working with them to try to improve some of the more granular information about what's going on, either in some of the regions or the business-to-business stuff, so we see what's going to landfills and to incinerators. All the recycling that's going on in the economy is really hard for them to track, so that's going to be an important area.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

You don't have any additional data that you feel would be missing that we should be gathering? What is the transparency piece in terms of the reporting requirements that we have right now?

[Jacinthe Seguin]

Right now, we don't have any specific reporting requirements. Reporting requirements would be attached to regulations and we're not specifically regulating plastic waste, but there are a lot of different aspects that are there.

[Helen Ryan]

I do think, as part of our Canada-wide strategy on zero plastic waste, one of the areas that will be important will be the monitoring and measurement of progress against the strategy and the action plan that's being put forward. Again, it'll be looking at the targeted actions that ministers agree to and then making sure there's appropriate information, either through data sources like Deloitte and Stats Canada or other sources, which provinces and territories have to make sure we're able to monitor and report.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

Mr. Godin, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

To be quite frank with you, your testimony gives me the impression that the department has many more than two irons in the fire. In other words, it has a lot of files to manage.

Has the department currently taken the necessary steps? Has it allocated the staff and funds necessary to achieve concrete results, not in the short term, but in the medium term? I feel that you are full of good will, but that you have arms full and are trying to catch up.

Is implementing measures to quickly reduce the use of plastic a priority for the department? If so, this implies that plastic production will decrease and that it will reduce the amount of GHGs. It's a cycle. It's basic, but it's still a reality.

Does the department intend to dedicate the necessary staff and effort to achieve this?

[Helen Ryan]

Thank you for the question.

It's a priority for our department and our minister, as indicated in her mandate letter.

Dealing with putting forward a strategy, working collaboratively with provinces and territories to put in place a Canada-wide strategy on zero plastic waste, is one of the mandate letter's priorities. The department is focusing attention and moving forward on that.

As I mentioned, last November, ministers came together and agreed to the strategy at their CCME meeting. There will be an action plan for the first phase of the strategy put forward to ministers again at their meeting in June.

In addition, there have been a number of targeted activities that have happened internationally in support of the ocean charter commitments, including some very important investments that have been made to support not only innovation but also recycling capacity in other countries, and a strong collaboration to move forward. There is a whole-of-government initiative that's happening. There's work going on with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, for instance, with Treasury Board, in tackling government operations, to mention but a few.