Environment committee  There are advances being made all the time in plastics packaging. There are now laminated plastics out there that are compatible with polyethylene plastic recycling. In other words, those multi-laminated plastic pouches everybody loves to hate are now being made in multiple layer

Environment committee  I'll be honest with you. I appreciate the difficulties with PVC, but it is a very recyclable plastic if you get enough of it. The difficulty is that we don't have economies of scale anymore because everybody says, “You can't do this anymore; you have to put it in this plastic.” Y

Environment committee  Which plastic...? PET, HDPE and polypropylene 1, 2 and 5 stay in Canada, and they are normally recycled.

Environment committee  Yes, because the residents are not necessarily good at cleaning everything the way you want them to. The other four plastics, typically the 3, 6 and 7, PVC, polystyrene and other plastics—that grand category of everything else—tend not to get recycled. There is a lot of work be

Environment committee  But the idea is that it can be cleaned, it can be used, it can be recycled or it can be recovered.

Environment committee  One great observation from Europe and one reason their deposit return rates are so high, especially Germany's, is that they have two deposit systems, one for single-use bottles. You want to attack the single-use plastic issue—the one-way water bottle, for example. The deposit is

Environment committee  There are a couple things. If you put policies in place just for plastics, you might run into something with trade, because now you're setting an uneven playing field for packaging within the country. What you're saying is, “Okay, plastics are bad, and I'm going to make sure yo

Environment committee  But you're going to have—

Environment committee  You'd have to regulate all packaging. That's what we started with. This is not just a plastic issue. It's a garbage issue. It's a waste issue.

Environment committee  There are a few things I think that the federal government could do. First of all, landfill is way too cheap in this country.

Environment committee  It has been for years. If you look anywhere—whether it's Germany, or anywhere else in the EU, the U.K.—you're looking at a hundred-dollar tax on landfilling that we don't have here. Whereas recycling's $200 to $250 a tonne, landfilling is $100 a tonne.

Environment committee  You can ship from Toronto down to Michigan for 51 bucks. Unless we start levelling that playing field.... You can control that, because that's the transportation of materials across a border. That's the transportation of waste. If you created for that the same idea that carbon's

Environment committee  —solve the garbage problem, then bring that up so it's level. The other thing, too, is the cost of making a recycled package—or pellets, whatever—is about 20% higher than the cost of oil. I'm not suggesting that you go and raise the price of oil to match it so that we have a lev

Environment committee  No, because you have a very, very robust infrastructure in Canada for mechanical recycling right now that you would just completely undermine, so it wouldn't be a good idea.

Environment committee  They work very well together. It's a very symbiotic relationship. You don't need to get rid of one to support the other.