It's a tough question to answer if you don't know how R and D develops. We continually get pressed as a corporation to develop new polymers to help food preservation.
One of the important aspects that we want to highlight in banning plastics, which we don't see as a viable path forward, is basically that the world is going to add two billion people in population by 2050. That requires 30% more water, 40% more energy and 50% more food production. One of the largest landfill items is food waste, so plastic manufactured items like food wrap go a long way to preserving food and keeping it on the shelves, helping to feed Canadians and individuals around the world.
The reality is that there is constant innovation. Dow and all of the other resin producers in the world are challenged every day to come up with new items that have higher recycling content, more recyclability aspects to them and different performance.
The difficulty, as I alluded to earlier, is that most people do not believe these six bans go far enough. Our concern is that as this list continues to expand, it will basically push products that are very useful to society out of the marketplace. The reality is that we really want to focus on the circular economy aspect. We think that the federal government should be putting most of its effort into developing financial measurements, infrastructures and national frameworks that really promote the circular economy.
Some of the best examples we have in Canada are basically the deposits that we have for pop bottles and water bottles. It's very difficult to find these bottles anywhere in the environment where these deposits are in operation. We would like to see some sort of mechanism for extended producer responsibility that would actually make post-consumed plastic not waste, but a resource. If we're going to go into a circular economy aspect, plastic is basically the feedstock for it.
The reality is that we have to keep these products in the environment, but we need to tackle the waste issue.