Environment committee  Your question asks about what a circular plastic economy would achieve in Canada and, currently, it's a linear system. We produce, we use and we dispose of plastics. That's how it works, essentially. The circular economy is on the way, though. It's not happening at the pace tha

Industry committee  Those systems are in place in many provinces, such as Quebec and a few other places. They are extremely successful. The return rates are really high, and they apply, sometimes, to plastics, bottles, glasses and different types of containers. They're very successful.

Industry committee  Yes. In anything we do, we often benchmark or do the previous analysis with what other countries are doing. On plastics, for example, the European Union is.... I want to say it's a set of countries that we are looking at often in terms of circularity, as an example. With recycl

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  The answer is collaboration with the levels of government across the table, given the jurisdictional powers and shared management responsibilities, generally speaking.

Industry committee  There's a lot of willingness. Ministers agreed to harmonize, for example, an EPR program. There's a lot of willingness. There have been guidance documents developed together. The lever you're talking about is how we make those documents real. This is where stakeholders are very

Industry committee  Thank you for the questions. I'll answer the second question first. These types of standards can be elaborated on through international co-operation. It is something that is possible. I'm not currently aware of activity in that domain, but this is how international co-operation

Industry committee  It goes back to the waste hierarchy. You want to reduce waste. You want to reuse. You want to refurbish. The type of model you're describing falls well into that waste hierarchy, which would create incentives for exactly what you're talking about. It is a model that I'm aware som

Industry committee  The best answer I can give you is that the manufacturers discharge their obligations through the fees from their own operations. They will not collect those fees from consumers to then transfer them to the province, for example. It's within their own operations. There might be ec

Industry committee  The provinces are responsible for the setting up and the administration of the EPR programs. At the federal level, we are working with them in the CCME, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, where we created a guidance document around the standardization and harmo

Industry committee  It's probably, just in quality terms, one of the really good ones in the country.

Industry committee  Can I just clarify whether this is related to B.C.?

Industry committee  Yes. The EPR, or the extended producer responsibility program, transfers the responsibility and cost for the design, recycling, and end-of-life management of the product from the public to the industry itself. The economics behind that is that the industry will then have all the

Industry committee  Given everything you've heard so far, we think that addressing the issue requires action by everybody, every level of government, including the industry, along the plastics life cycle, from design to cleanup and along the value chain. We do believe heavily in collaboration. We wo

Industry committee  I can provide the information through Stats Canada.