Science and Research Committee on Sept. 26th, 2024

[Sarah Marshall]

This is a co-operative effort that needs to happen across the federal government and the provinces to work towards harmonization on the collection of plastic that can be used in recycling again, on how it is labelled, on how it is calculated in terms of its content in the recycled product, and ultimately on how it's scaled for recycling technologies. It is a co-operative effort.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Is it a coincidence that Merlin is based in British Columbia because of the volume of recycled plastic that's available there, or is it because of what British Columbia has been doing?

[Sarah Marshall]

Merlin Plastics has been in British Columbia for a long time and has successfully run a recycling business for a long time. They were a natural partner for Nova Chemicals to start our journey in recycling and to work with them to improve quality and help them bring that product to the market. As a result of that co-operation, we've continued on our recycling journey and are building our own recycling facilities, the next with a partner, and we look forward to scaling that some more and continuing to supply that demand from the marketplace.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's more than our time. Thank you so much.

Thank you to all of the witnesses. You may also submit additional information through the clerk. I'll suspend briefly now to allow the witnesses to leave, and we'll resume with our second panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Welcome back, everyone.

For those participating via video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. For interpretation for those on Zoom, you have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor, English or French.

It's now my pleasure to welcome, from the Calgary Co-operative Association Limited, Rob Morphew, health, safety and environment director. From École de technologie supérieure, we have Dr. Annie Levasseur, professor and scientific director, by video conference. From Leaf Environmental Products Inc., we have Jerry Gao, who is the founder. Welcome to our committee.

Up to five minutes will be given for opening remarks, after which we will proceed with rounds of questions.

Mr. Morphew, the floor is yours for an opening statement of up to five minutes.

[Rob Morphew, Health, Safety and Environment Director, Calgary Co-operative Association Limited]

Thank you, Chair.

Good afternoon. Thank you for your time and for allowing me to come and speak with this committee.

As the health, safety and environment director with Calgary Co-op, I was charged with putting this program into place, taking the time to research the product that needed to be there and bringing it forward. I hope this committee will see the benefit and the effort of individuals and businesses in removing plastics where they can find viable alternatives.

Owned by members, Calgary Co-op is now the largest retail co-operative in North America with over 440,000 members, 3,850 employees, assets of $627 million and over $1.2 billion in sales. Our locations in Calgary, Airdrie, Cochrane, High River, Okotoks and Strathmore include food stores; pharmacies; gas bars; car washes; home health care centres; wine, spirits and beer locations; cannabis locations; Community Natural Foods; Beacon Pharmacy; a majority of Care Pharmacies; and Willow Park Wines and Spirits.

When we introduced this fully compostable bag in April 2019 and fully eliminated single-use plastic shopping bags from our lines of business in January 2020, we started down a path to eliminate 33 million plastic bags going to landfills annually, and since then, we've removed over 100 million plastic bags from landfills since we introduced 100% compostable shopping bags in 2019. We did this because we believed strongly that this was the right thing to do for our community and for our planet.

In creating this program, we worked closely with the City of Calgary to ensure our bag design would be compatible with local composting facilities and would break down easily within their 28-day cycle before we introduced them into the community. We continue to work with the City of Calgary to ensure that they still break down in its facilities. Our bag contains a stamp of approval from the City of Calgary as evidence that it will accept them at its facilities.

Following our switch to the fully compostable bags, we were thrilled to hear from our thousands of members that they found multiple second and third uses for our compostable bags. These included bin liners for the household bins, using them for pet and garden waste or bringing stuff back to the store if they needed to do that. There were multiple uses. They weren't just taking them home and throwing them into the recycle bin. It was always our hope that the public would embrace these bags and would find ways to incorporate them into their daily lives, and we're pleased to see Calgarians doing just that. In addition to introducing the compostable bags, we also continue to encourage our members to bring in or to purchase reusable shopping bags to carry their groceries or other purchases in, providing options for our members to take their groceries home.

By all accounts, our transition away from single-use plastics has been a resounding success and has been an example of how innovation can be used to solve some of our most pressing climate challenges, which is why we were shocked to learn that our bags were going to be included in the federal government ban, nationwide, even though they contain no plastics or microplastics. Even more bizarre is the fact that we would still be permitted to sell our compostable bags on shelves in bundles, but not individually at the till. To us, this makes no sense if the government's goal is, as they stated publicly, to eliminate single-use bags from the environment, regardless of their composition or characteristics.

Even after the federal ban took effect, our bags could still be sold to the consumer, who continued to use them in a multitude of ways. What's more, other single-use plastic bags, bin catchers and compostable bags on the market will also remain on store shelves, failing to address the problem that the federal government is claiming it wants to resolve, which is to get rid of plastics.

It is true that not all compostable bags are created equal. Some do contain microplastics and fail to break down quickly in the natural environment, but the solution should not be to issue a blanket ban on all compostables. Instead, we've offered to work with the various levels of government to create a set of universal standards for the composition and the labelling of compostable bags to ensure that only those that meet the most stringent of criteria would be allowed to be in circulation.

This would offer Canadians a choice when it comes to how they reduce their reliance on single-use plastics beyond just the cloth-like reusable bags, which take a significant amount of energy to produce, and it would encourage continued innovation in this space. It defies logic to simply ban compostable options when there can and should be an important effort to eliminate single-use plastics.

Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault has said that his department will not consider providing Calgary Co-op with an exemption to the single-use plastics ban, nor will he work with us to create standards that would allow for the use of the compostable bag options. We view this position as both disappointing and short-sighted. We should be providing Canadians with as many alternatives to single-use plastics as possible, not limiting them to just one and banning all others.

It's only a matter of time before the playing field shifts again and further innovation will be required to keep up. Furthermore, what kind of message does this send to businesses across industry sectors when the government outright rejects new and innovative ideas meant to solve complex problems and improve the lives of Canadians and instead imposes a one-size-fits-all solution that fails to see the forest for the trees?

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's your time, sir. You'll have a chance to answer more questions.

Now I would like to turn it over to Mr. Gao for a five-minute opening.

[Jerry Gao, Founder, LEAF Environmental Products Inc.]

Thank you.

I'm Jerry Gao. I'm the founder and president of Leaf Environmental Products Inc., a Calgary-based company founded in 2017 with a mission to eliminate single-use plastics through compostable alternatives.

I've been in the industry of plastic reduction since its infancy in Canada. I've served in various roles in my capacity, including as co-chair of the environment, health and safety committee for BOMA, the Building Owners and Managers Association, where, among other things, we provided policy guidance on waste management for about two billion square feet of office space across Canada. My company, Leaf, has also worked very directly with municipalities around Canada, such as the City of Calgary as well as the City of Winnipeg, on the effectiveness of compostable polymers in municipal composting facilities.

My goal here is just to provide a realistic and accurate perspective of the issue for my industry and hopefully help the policy-makers in making responsible policies.

First, I'll discuss the current policies in Canada and their impacts. ECCC has actually done a very good job on the impact assessment. On page 2574 of the Canada Gazette, part II, volume 156, number 13, table 6 tells us that in the next 10 years with this policy, we will eliminate 1.5 million tonnes of plastics from our environment. However, on the next page over, in table 7, we're told that 2.9 million tonnes of additional waste will be generated as a substitute for the plastics that we eliminate. Out of that 2.9 million tonnes, 2.6 million will be paper products, including paper bags as substitutes for plastic shopping bags.

When we compare the numbers, we actually generate double the amount of waste that we seek to eliminate. By the estimates of Environment Canada, we use about 15 billion bags a year in Canada. At about 700 paper bags per tree, you're cutting down 200 million trees in the next 10 years just to make paper bags. We went from paper bags in the seventies to plastic bags, and now we're back to paper bags. We've said that we're going to plant two billion trees by the end of 2031. This is clearly contradictory to what our intents are with the environment.

Since we also conduct business outside of Canada, I want to provide information on other jurisdictions. Out of all the OECD countries, Italy and Germany excel the most at recycling and waste policy. Both have opted to include and use compostable bags as an innovative product to replace these plastics. Since January 2011, Italy was able to eliminate all of its single-use plastic bags, including produce bags at supermarkets, leading to 280 billion plastic bags eliminated from the environment in the last 14 years their policy has been in existence. Not only that; they've also established the western world's leading industry in compostable resins. The industry is growing very quickly every year. With our abundant resources and technology, we can take advantage of that huge explosion in plastics innovation.

Last but not least, I want to provide some reasonable, realistic recommendations for our policy-makers here. First, we recommend that compostable bags be recommended as the substitute to single-use plastic bags instead of paper bags, as their global track record really proves their efficacy.

Second, we recommend that the Government of Canada abolish the term “non-conventional plastic” as a catch-all category for everything that wasn't examined, and perform specific and detailed analysis of current compostable polymers and their applications.

Last but not least, we recommend a dedication of additional resources and research to innovative solutions in the reduction of plastic waste. Before this policy took effect, I worked with the folks at Environment Canada extensively to provide information on compostable polymers. I provided numerous pieces of scientific evidence that there is absolutely no plastic in our products, so I was quite shocked that my products were lumped into this non-conventional plastic category.

Again, I later learned that it was a catch-all category for everything that wasn't looked at. It seemed to me that more than a decade of research, data and innovation was written off for the sake of “optics” or “visibility”, which I'd heard repeatedly during my consultations with the department.

However, not all was lost. Our mayor, Mayor Jyoti Gondek, and Minister Rebecca Schulz have both issued letters of support for our compostable bags, as both have used them at home and can attest to their ability to break down into compost.

In conclusion, I want to thank the chair and the rest of the committee for this wonderful opportunity today. Compostable bags are sold across the country in most cities as bin liners. These shopping bags are literally the same as the bags that are allowed in Ottawa's green bin program. I was not able to show a video today, but I do have a time-lapse video of our compostable bags breaking down into biomass as quickly as three days in the bin.

Let's all use science, innovation and reason to solve these problems.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's your time, Mr. Gao.

[Jerry Gao]

Let common sense prevail.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

I'm sorry, but that's your time. You'll have a chance to answer questions.

Now we'll turn to our final witness.

Dr. Levasseur, you have the floor for five minutes.

Thank you.

[Annie Levasseur, Professor and Scientific Director, Centre d'études et de recherches intersectorielles en économie circulaire, École de technologie supérieure]

Good afternoon and thank you.

I am a professor at the École de technologie supérieure, or ETS for short, and the Canada research chair in measuring the impact of human activities on climate change. My comments today are based on that expertise, which focuses on measuring the environmental impact of human activities and using a systemic approach to guide decision-making.

I'm also the scientific director of the Centre d'études et de recherches intersectorielles en économie circulaire, or CERIEC, based at the ETS. CERIEC works to move the circular economy forward through interdisciplinary scientific research, as well as training, dialogue and knowledge transfer initiatives, in order to maximize the benefits for economic stakeholders, governments and society.

CERIEC's research is conducted primarily through an ecosystem of sector-specific labs to accelerate the transition to the circular economy. Each lab brings together stakeholders across the value chain in a given sector, ranging from research institutions and governments to industry and members of civil society. Through co-creation workshops, they develop a series of collaborative research projects. During the workshops, participants identify the barriers to the circular economy within the sector. They can be technological barriers, of course, but they can also be regulatory, economic and social barriers. That information is then used to come up with potential solutions, which in turn become the focus of research projects, in co-operation with partners on the ground.

Plastic circularity is not possible without taking into account the entire material life cycle, both for plastics and for the alternative materials proposed. The risk of shifting problems is high if that principle isn't adhered to, as recent history has shown. We've seen, for example, that producing certain bioplastics can be more energy-intensive. We know that producing some biosourced materials on a large scale causes other kinds of environmental problems, including deforestation, biodiversity loss and eutrophication in the case of agricultural biomass production.

The concept of plastic circularity extends far beyond recycling. The circular economy is more than just recycling. It's a model whereby production and use are aimed at maximizing resource use at every stage of the product life cycle, in accordance with the principles of a circular economy, in order to reduce the environmental impact.

The circular economy model entails a range of strategies. The focus cannot be on recycling alone. To begin with, it's important to rethink how we make and use products to ensure minimal resource use, regardless of the material chosen. Circular economy strategies include eco-design, responsible sourcing policies and maximized operational efficiency. Also important is implementing strategies that allow products to become more use-intensive, such as the sharing economy, in which goods are shared by many users. Another key principle is extending product longevity as much as possible. That means moving away from single-use materials, and promoting the repair, reuse and refurbishment of all materials. Ultimately, when a material can no longer be reused, its value as a resource should be leveraged through recycling, valorization and symbiotic relationships within the industry.

The barriers to the circularity of plastics are many, so it would certainly be useful to study them using a model similar to that of the CERIEC labs. Some challenges are, of course, technological. Existing processes can't be used to effectively recycle some plastics that have reached the end of their life cycle, so further research is needed to come up with the right processes. In many cases, though, the technology is available but other kinds of barriers exist. This is a major issue, and I've spoken with many in the industry about it. The geographic distribution of plastics at the end of their life cycle is very spread out. They are all over the place, in homes and businesses. In order to be profitable, recycling plants have to operate on a large scale. That means having to ship plastics over long distances, which doesn't make economic sense.

Developing other circular economy strategies beyond recycling is key. If we want to be more disciplined in using resources of any kind, we have to do a better job of designing products. In other words, they need to be made with the right materials in the right place, they need to be reliable and repairable to prolong their longevity, and they need to allow for the separation of component materials so they can be recycled at the end of their life cycle.

Something else that's important is putting the right financial and regulatory incentives in place to help the reuse, refurbishment and recycling sectors develop. As long as landfilling materials is cheaper than recycling them, advancing recycling will be a challenge. Similarly, as long as manufacturers continue to sell products that can't be repaired, people can't be expected to prolong the lives of those products. That applies to plastics and other materials alike. To help the plastic circularity sector develop more quickly and improve the circularity of materials at every stage of the product life cycle, the government should devise a road map. This will not only ensure that efforts are better coordinated, but also foster measures that have a meaningful impact.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much, Dr. Levasseur.

Thank you, all of you, for your opening remarks.

I'll now open the floor to questions.

Please be sure to indicate to whom your questions are directed.

We'll kick that question round off with MP Tochor for six minutes, please.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses.

I'm going to start with the Calgary Co-op.

Prior to the bags of the Calgary Co-op being banned, did your members and customers know they were getting a compost bag when they purchased these bags at the till?

[Rob Morphew]

Yes, they did. Despite the opinion of the members of Environment and Climate Change Canada that our customers or members weren't informed that they were getting compost bags, they were.

We took a lot of time to ensure that. Many emails were sent to our members, explaining that we were switching to compost bags. As well, our cashiers were trained to ask the customer if they wanted to purchase a compostable bag for 15¢ to take out their groceries. If they answered no, they were then asked what would they like to use, including encouraging them to purchase another reusable bag if they didn't bring one in with them.

We also ensured that our bags were clearly marked as compostable and have the BPI certification criteria identified on them. As you can see on the bag, if you can't tell that it's compostable.... I don't know if you can see everything on it, but it's very compostable. It is clearly identified. It is green. There's colour that stands out from everything else that is there. BPI certification meets ASTM 6400 and ISO 17088.

The Bureau de normalisation du Québec also has a compostable plastic standard to ensure that compostable materials will not affect the environment or the compost product.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

It sounds like they're aware.

As much as we have one Albertan here, the rest are from Ontario and other places. What was the push-back or the general mood of the city when they found out that it was bad enough that they couldn't use what they were used to, but the replacement one, which was compostable and met all of the requirements the government set forward, was still bad? What were the comments from the public or a typical customer?

[Rob Morphew]

Our members were very disappointed. We spent four years getting them ready, getting them into those bags. They grew to love them. They found them very easy to use. It allowed them to purchase three or four or however many they felt they could use in a grocery shopping trip.

When the ban came out, we told them: “Guess what. You can't buy them at the till any more and you're going to have to buy them down on the shelf or wherever.” We got a lot of negative comments. There were a lot of comments on social media about how stupid it was that they were being banned. There was a lot of support for us in terms of getting communication to other people and saying, “Hey, this is stupid. This is something that shouldn't be done.”

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Just to confirm, did you say the former mayor of Calgary or the NDP leader in Alberta came out for this?

[Rob Morphew]

It was the current mayor. We introduced them with the current mayor.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Why did you make the switch? Was it just a regulation, or was there a motive for the Calgary Co-op?

[Rob Morphew]

We wanted to get out of giving away plastic bags at the till, and it was the right thing to do. Our members and our customers have the opportunity at an annual general meeting to tell us what they would like to see us do, and environmental conscience and social conscience were always pieces of it. They said, “Hey, we could do something to eliminate the number of plastic bags you're giving out.” We went down that path, found them and did that.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

I've seen those bags before, but I didn't see them in person. At the break, I'm going to want to take a little closer look at them.

Our consumers can still buy the bags. They just can't buy them at the till. Is that right? It's not at the convenient time, once you think about it.

[Rob Morphew]

They can buy them. Down the aisle, for example, there are rolls of five and 10. They can buy them, take them home and do whatever they want with them.

Yes, they can still get them. They just can't get them with our cashiers putting groceries in them so that they can go out with them. They have to figure out a different way to carry out their groceries.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

It's something when the government forces industry and Canadians to change and makes all these hoops to jump through. You guys go out, find a producer, get it verified that it's compostable and that there's no plastic and you're still shunned. It's the lack of common sense that is so frustrating out here.

What does your board believe the next steps are? What is the Calgary Co-op going to do to, hopefully, keep...? I encourage you to carry on to find a replacement, but what are the next steps?