The reason it's a low bar is they are arguably the most visibly polluting types of plastics that we have, and they are not necessary for the day-to day carrying on of society. I'm thinking specifically of plastic straws and single-use plastic bags, for example. There are always exceptions in the health care field or for other reasons. With all types of new regulation where we're considering changing things for the first time, it's pretty rare that we impose an outright ban on everything. Typically, we do pilots, we do test cases or we start with a particular realm of a substance or an activity. We then regulate it, and then people's behaviour starts to change. The perfect example for that is our blue box recycling program across Canada.
In the Capital Regional District where I live, about 10 ago—we've had it for many more years than that—the district, which owns the Hartland landfill, decided it was going to be too expensive to find another landfill within 50 years. That was the projected life of the landfill right here in one of the most expensive housing markets in Canada. If we were to find a new landfill, we would have to truck our waste up and over a set of mountains and then carry on up the island and pollute another community.
In short, what the CRD decided to do was to decrease our waste by 50%, and it progressively instituted additional regulations for what was banned from the landfill. Suddenly we're taking a lot more types of plastic in our blue boxes. We can no longer put yard waste or food waste in our garbage cans, and within five years, they met their targets to reduce waste by 50%. That's exactly the same analogy for this slow but incremental regulation of plastics. We shift behaviour over a period of time and allow that change to occur.