Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to join today's meeting.
My name is Jo-Anne St. Godard. I'm the executive director of the Circular Innovation Council. We are a leading, independent and not-for-profit organization focusing on accelerating Canada toward a circular economy and away from our current linear take-make-waste-based economy. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the circular economy, it is a model that decouples economic activity from the production and consumption of finite resources.
To offer some context to my comments today, before becoming the CIC, for over 40 years we were the Recycling Council of Ontario. In that capacity, we helped shape many of Canada's waste reduction and recycling policies and programs aimed at shifting markets toward redefining waste to valuable resources and reorganizing systems that allowed discarded materials, including plastics, to become valued feedstocks in the manufacturing of new products. Part of this role required our ability to unite policy-makers, industry interests and other stakeholders. One of our greatest achievements was the launch of Canada's blue box packaging and plastics recycling program created jointly by the private and public sectors. It is currently collecting more than 65% of the plastic packaging from our homes and is now replicated around the world.
With this experience and expertise in mind, and to respond to the committee's pursuit to conduct research to improve plastics recycling in Canada, I offer the following.
Recycling doesn't need more research. Governments and industries alike clearly understand the causation of our current poor recycling rates of plastic discards. It is fundamentally attributed to the economic disparity between the low price and availability of virgin plastics and the negative value and low availability of clean and reliable recycled plastics. For over 50 years, we have been designing and redesigning recycling programs to improve their recycling rates, spending millions on collection, infrastructure, sorting and processing, and matching operational investments with more millions toward consumer education.
If we are honest, we should acknowledge that for decades existing plastic recycling programs have effectively been financed, financially propped up, by the subsidy offered by Canadian municipalities and their respective taxpayers, making it effectively free for industry. Provincial governments are now course correcting, introducing new producer responsibility regulations to transfer these costs to manufacturers, their supply chains and their sellers. The primary objective of this transfer is to require these actors who design and sell plastics into the market to invest in a system that effectively collects and recycles them at end of life. Another objective is that these new costs will incent better design packaging and products for this system.
These relatively new EPR policy interventions are starting to take effect, coalescing in the financial contributions of producers who have taken ownership of the programs becoming intimately familiar with their costs, their limitations and their corresponding opportunity to improve them. It is estimated that Ontario's blue box program alone will cost producers over a billion dollars next year, with a significant portion of that investment dedicated to improving plastic packaging recycling specifically. Similar EPR legislation targeting other plastic products, such as computer equipment, is also expanding. New policies are being contemplated for other plastic products, such as textiles and carpets.
The effects of these new producer funding investments, tied in part to regulated plastic recycling targets, will offer an important market investment toward new plastic recycling processes, including mechanical and chemical, efficient collection and transport infrastructure operations, improved product and packaging design and, of course, expanded public education. As such, I would caution the committee to not proceed with research on plastic recycling at this time but to allow time for these new producer investments to take full effect.
There is, however, an important opportunity for this committee to reinvest and invest in research to better understand the product designs that optimize the amount of post-consumed recycled plastics. As mentioned, the cause of our consistently low recycling rates for plastics is directly attributed to low commodity value caused by a lack of market demand. Designing plastic products and packaging that maximizes the amount of recycled materials, backstopped by policies that require it, will spark much-needed market interest. This market demand will meet the new industry investments being made in recycling operations, which is the perfect recipe for sustained, high-performance and markets-based plastics recycling programs.
Thank you.