Environment committee  Am I aware of any reforms?

Environment committee  I think—

Environment committee  Theoretically, you could set a national plastics recycling target, and different sectors would engage in strategies. One recycles more than the other, and they could trade their recycling credits. That sounds good in theory, but I prefer looking at sectors and saying, “We use thi

Environment committee  A lot of questions have been asked about reduction, and I think you have to ask yourself what problem you're solving. If you're reducing plastics because they're going into the marine environment and they're a problem, that's a specific issue you're dealing with. It may be that y

Environment committee  Certainly all of those Rs are legitimate strategies to address the problem. As a first step, I'd like to get the parties responsible for that to pay the full cost so they can pick the right R for the right solution. Maybe I should reuse this. Maybe I shouldn't use this plastic at

Environment committee  Certainly when you start creating high requirements for recycling and the scale starts to increase, your unit costs start to come down, the technologies get more sophisticated and you get more innovation—first in how to recycle it and then in how to bring the cost of recycling do

Environment committee  On carbon engineering, what I was talking—

Environment committee  If we as a society say that we want to keep plastics out of the waste stream and out of the environment and we put these policies in place, those companies will respond to the market demand for more recycling by making the investments they need to make. We talked about how to get

Environment committee  Right now, with disposal of plastic virtually unpriced, there's no incentive to look at any of the R's. When you start to put in requirements to collect and recycle, as I said earlier, at some point you might look at a certain product and say, “Yes, we can collect it and recycle

Environment committee  Essentially, you're putting a price on disposing of it.

Environment committee  It's not uncommon for recyclers that have traditionally done mechanical recycling to start partnering with innovators in the chemical recycling sector so they can provide a portfolio of approaches to deal with the wide range of plastics that are out there. Again, these are recyc

Environment committee  Sure. If you're gasifying something at high energy and turning it into its molecular building blocks, you can then take out the impurities and then just recover the hydrocarbons and reform them back into plastics, and that's what you're trying to achieve. It's not perfect today,

Environment committee  If we talk about coffee cups, and you create a regulation that says that coffee cups need to be collected and recycled at a rate of 85% or 90%, then the fast food outlet has a choice to make to meet that target. The coffee cup needs to be redesigned to make it recyclable to meet

Environment committee  If you look at Canada, the jurisdiction for waste falls with the provinces and the federal government has powers under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. An analogy would be the European Union, where the European Union gets together and sets these targets for the member s

Environment committee  I sit on the Alberta Beverage Container Management Board, which oversees the deposit return system. Alberta enjoys the highest plastic bottle collection rate in Canada, at 82.3%—if I'm rhyming my latest numbers off—with an overall recovery rate of 85.5% for all beverage container