Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to appear before this committee.
My name is Norman Lee, and I am the director of waste management at the Regional Municipality of Peel.
The Region of Peel is home to over 1.5 million people, who generate over 500,000 tons of residential waste each year. We currently divert half of it, including 100,000 tons through our blue box program and another 100,000 tons through our green bin and yard waste programs. We have a target of 75% diversion by 2034 and are making significant investments to reach it.
In Ontario, municipalities manage about one-third of all waste generated, including virtually all residential waste. We also collect much of the litter. I expect other provinces are similar. The municipal perspective is therefore important, and I thank you for taking the time to hear it.
One of the most significant waste management challenges faced by municipalities today is the recycling of plastic packaging, which is becoming lighter and more complex, making it more difficult and more expensive to manage. The lack of mandatory recycled content requirements results in weak demand for some recovered plastics, such as the plastic film used in grocery bags. Messages from brand owners and retailers often conflict with municipal messaging about what can be recycled or composted. This results in materials being put in the wrong bin, which increases cost and decreases diversion.
The Region of Peel supports the use of an evidence-based approach to assess problematic single-use plastics. The region supports the establishment of minimum recycled contents. We support the expansion of EPR programs across Canada. We support the proposed ban on harmful single-use plastics, including the six items identified for the initial ban.
These single-use plastics are often undetected and increasingly difficult to separate in municipal facilities. They contaminate our recycling and our compost, and are a major contributor to litter in our streets, parks and waterways.
While municipalities support the use of environmentally friendly alternatives, we are concerned with the promotion of compostable plastic-like materials until our systems can be changed to manage them. These materials pose a challenge at our composting facilities, because our facilities are not designed to compost them. Nor are they designed to effectively separate them out as contaminants. To retrofit our facilities right now would be prohibitively expensive.
The Region of Peel operates its own composting system. We’ve worked with a number of producers to test the compostability of their products and packages. At the end of a standard nine-week composting cycle, none of the materials we tested were fully decomposed. They would contaminate the finished compost, reducing its value or, worse, making it unsellable.
The Region of Peel is investing $100 million to develop an anaerobic digestion facility for its green bin material. This facility will be better at removing contaminants, but our investigations show that most compostable products and packaging would be removed early in the process and sent to landfill.
We think the following measures should be put in place before compostable plastics and plastic-like materials are introduced and supported as an alternative to single-use plastics: national certification standards that ensure that materials marketed as “compostable” can be composted in practice and at scale; national labelling and advertising standards to reduce consumer and resident confusion; and producer responsibility programs for compostable products and packaging, preferably in accordance with national standards or guidelines. These should be accompanied by federal programs to support investment in processing infrastructure for compostable products and packaging, and mandatory recycled content requirements that are sufficiently high and enforceable.