Thank you all so much for being here once again. You've been regulars at the environment committee overall, and we're very appreciative of the testimony and your helping us to better understand how we can reduce the amount of plastic in our environment and the contamination being caused by it. As we've heard from so much testimony, only 9% of our plastics are making it to recycling. We have to do better. Nine per cent just doesn't cut it, and we're seeing the impacts of that globally.
We just finished Earth Day collections last weekend and the weekend before in many different municipalities, and the vast majority of waste seen in the ditches in our rural communities is plastic. It disgusts people.
We've heard different testimony on regulating plastic. If I understand correctly, you recommend putting plastic under schedule 1 of CEPA. Could we then take a number of different measures, such as regulating recyclability and banning toxic plastics such as PVC and polystyrene and the like, as well as other single-use plastics? Could we take it as far as banning the landfilling of plastic to help enforce recyclability, putting a moratorium on it so that all plastics are created recyclable and then ensuring that all plastics are collected for recycling?
I'm just wondering how far you feel the authority of the federal level of government goes to take national actions on plastic pollution. Can we go this far under CEPA?