Thank you.
Good afternoon, Madam Chair and honourable members of the committee.
My name is Peter Vinall. I am the president of Sustane Technologies. I'm joined by Robert Richardson, co-founder and chief financial officer. We very much appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today about Sustane and how we're positioned.
I listened to the two previous speakers, and I would say that I'm in 80% agreement: We can reduce consumption, absolutely. There's a lot we can do to reduce consumption. It's a huge problem that we're facing with plastics.
We can also improve recycling. I wouldn't agree 100% with the second speaker on chemical recycling, but I'll get to that in a minute.
We're a Canadian clean-tech company founded in 2014. We're on a mission to really improve waste circularity as much as possible and to have a global impact.
We've heard the number of 9% for actual recycled plastic. That's a number we use as well. We have to change it. Conventional recycling is broken. Millions and millions of tonnes of waste plastic are thrown away in Canada, and many more around the world, ending up in landfills or the environment, threatening the health of our species and our quality of life.
However, certain plastics are critical for use in society for health, agriculture and maintaining our quality of life. Biodegradable alternatives are being developed, but not fast enough. More progress needs to be made on all fronts. That's where our Sustane-able solution comes in.
At Sustane, we're focused on improving waste circularity by repurposing single-use and end-of-life plastics that would otherwise end up in the landfills back into feedstocks for plastics. We're not about burning plastics and we're not about making fuels: We're about making feedstocks and manufacturing new plastics or existing plastics, but from plastics instead of fossil sources. Through our proprietary mechanized process, we can recycle up to 90% of landfill-destined waste back into plastic feedstock and negative-carbon biogenic products, replacing the current high-carbon processes.
To give you a sense of scale, Sustane's plant in Chester, Nova Scotia, can process the waste of 150,000 people, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 200,000 tonnes per year. In Nova Scotia, in addition to municipal solid waste and rejected plastic from recycling plants that don't work very well, we process plastics from the federal Department of Fisheries' ghost gear cleanup as well as their end-of-life navigation buoys. We turn that into plastic feedstock of the highest quality, with negligible impact on the environment.
We recently signed an agreement with Wetaskiwin county in Alberta to build a facility there, which will be focused not just on municipal solid waste and end-of-life plastics but also on agricultural plastics waste. We have a memorandum of understanding with Washington state as well and are planning our expansion into the U.S.
Madam Chair and committee members, we believe that industry needs to be responsible in the use of plastics, but the government must also recognize that for many processes, plastics are the only economically viable material in the immediate future. In the longer term, miracles might happen, but right now we're facing a crisis, and we need to do something.
Plastic contamination of our precious oceans is a growing concern. While it's true that here in Canada we have processes to prevent this, we currently allow the exportation of our waste plastic to developing countries that do allow large volumes of our waste plastic to enter the oceans. If we're serious about being a leader in protecting our oceans, which we should be, we should take responsibility for our waste. We now have a made-in-Canada solution for plastics, so the federal government should ban the export of this plastics waste and support developing companies, such as Sustane, that are leading the circular economy with innovations that can be exported.
Thanks again.
I'd like to turn it over to Robert, who is going to talk a bit about our journey as we transition from technology developer to commercialization and about some of the challenges we face.
Thanks, Robert.