Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. I'm here on behalf of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada. We are an $80-billion chemistry and plastics industry in Canada. We are Canada's third-largest industry, with 80% of everything we make exported out of this nation. This is not a made-in-Canada issue. This is a global issue.
I'm pleased to be joined by my colleague, Elena Mantagaris. She'll certainly assist in responding to any of your questions.
Before I start by offering our perspectives on the bill itself, I think it's important to have some context.
First, it's very important to understand that our industry shares Parliament's and society's view that unmanaged plastic waste has no place in the natural environment.
Second, our industry accepts that it does have a disproportionate share of responsibility for addressing the issue. That must start with the acceleration of innovation towards a circular economy and with design. Our industry has set out ambitious goals in North America to ensure that by 2030 no plastic packaging is designed that is not recyclable. That's less than a mere decade away.
The third area is one that people are often surprised by. I think it's a major difference, at times, between Canada and the United States. Our industry fully endorses extended producer responsibility programs, EPR programs, such as the one in British Columbia, whereby industry is fully responsible for paying for and operating recycling systems that achieve aggressive province-wide recycling targets. We're working every day with other provinces. We expect that in a mere few years, we will have 85% of the Canadian population within industry-funded EPR programs.
Finally, our industry believes that a circular economy for plastics is not only possible but indeed achievable, and within a modest time frame. Our customers are demanding it. There's no question about that. There's a need for a number of transformational initiatives to respond to those customer demands.
You know, we've heard comments about small industries, small solutions. This is a global industry. It's a big industry. The real solutions are getting the recovered materials back into the plastic-producing facilities so that the resins themselves have a high material content of recycled resin, no matter what products they go into. If you have a 50% recycled content resin, then whatever those resins go to will have a 50% recycled content. That's a solution at scale.
We already shared with this committee a comprehensive critique of the private member's bill, so our remarks will be brief.
Again, we do understand Parliament's laudable intentions. Canadians are surely frustrated by the images of mixed, improperly sorted, contaminated plastic waste being sent off for disposal without any realistic expectation that they'll be recycled or processed. However, in our view, Bill C-204 is not necessary to address this. The bill was initiated prior to the Basel amendments, and those significant amendments have come into place, ratified by more than 170 countries, including Canada. The work continues. There's a lot of work in developing guidance for those amendments, and Canada's at the forefront of that work.
Certainly one thing this committee should take into account is the guidance that comes out of the Basel Convention for these amendments. Those amendments do outlaw trade in hazardous plastic wastes and in non-hazardous post-consumer plastics not intended for recycling and without prior and informed consent.
On many levels, Bill C-204 is redundant to those requirements, and at the same time it adds confusion. On the list of plastic wastes, we include things like ethylene, which is a feedstock. It's not a plastic waste.
MP Davidson gave a nice definition of “final disposal”, but there is no definition of it in the bill itself. There's a lack of process that will allow for the continued movement of post-consumer materials, specifically between Canada, the United States and other OECD countries.
There's a lot of work to realizing a global circular economy for post-consumer plastics. It starts with thinking of these materials as a resource and not a waste. We know what to do with waste: We put it in landfill. We know what to do with resources: We let resources move freely between political jurisdictions and across boundaries, so especially in the OECD countries, especially in this integrated North American marketplace, we have to tear down and not build up those barriers to moving post-consumer resources around. We have to recover back into Canada the material that goes into the U.S. with our products so that we can have that circular economy at scale.
Again, if we focus only on what we do in Canada, that's the 20% of plastics that we produce here that stays here. We send out 80% of what we make. If we want our facilities here to have plastic resin that has a high material content of post-consumer plastics, we need to have a mechanism to make sure we bring that back. Thickening the border for the exchange of post-consumer plastics as a resource will not assist with that.
Mr. Chair, those are our comments for today. Thank you very much.