Distinguished members of the House of Commons, thank you for inviting us to speak with you.
We would like to begin by acknowledging that ERA is located on unceded indigenous lands. Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many first nations. Today it is home to a diverse population of indigenous and other peoples. We respect the continued connections with the past, present and future in our ongoing relationship with indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.
My name is Sarah Sajedi. I have my partner, Gary Vegh, with me. He's the senior environmental toxicologist and I am the chief technology officer. We both are chemists. We have been working for the past 26 years-plus in the area. ERA is a Montreal-based software developer which works closely with manufacturers to create solutions for their sustainable problems and minimize their emissions in waste and water, and any other environmentally related media.
ERA has worked for 26 years with industries, like wood cabinetry and furniture, automotive, chemicals and paints and the general manufacturing sector. We are global leaders in environmental health and safety software for the automotive industry. A vast majority of OEMs are currently using ERA software to track their environmental impacts.
I would like to use this opportunity to talk about waste minimization. ERA believes that waste minimization is one of the issues. That is our platform: greener industrial and consumer packaging, and how to minimize the waste we are creating and the global impacts it has on both our economy and future environmental sustainability.
I have some simple facts about waste. Canadians throw away three million tonnes of plastic waste, only 9% of which is recycled. This means the vast majority of plastic ends up in landfills. Approximately 80% of plastic waste that ends up in bodies of water comes from the land. As a result, there is a cost of clean up. Canada pays to ship 12% of its plastic to Southeast Asia, which has caused quite a bit of issues. Oceana Canada estimates that the cost of cleaning plastic from the Great Lakes is over $468 million. It's that much.
The Government of Canada has done studies that have shown that the cleaning of plastics and everything after the fact is costing over $7.8 billion in landfills and other areas. This is a very costly endeavour. We need to get ahead of this. How we get ahead of waste is by doing two different things. We need to take preventive and corrective measures.
Preventive measures promote green packaging. Some 60% to 70% of the waste that is created comes from packaging, whether it's industrial packaging or consumer packaging. We have gone overboard, above and beyond.
We need to help companies with a methodology to analyze the chemical composition of what they are putting in their packaging, because there is a lot of greenwashing going on of the physical properties. Subsidies should be provided for green packaging development.
On the other hand, corrective measures are needed to develop ways to handle the end use, as we do with water. Some 50 to 100 years ago, there were no municipal systems, but now, water is no longer an issue. We have to look at technology similar to that.
I thank you for giving us this opportunity. I look forward to our further discussions.