Environment committee  As much as possible we want to be moving away from single use altogether, so I am not super keen to give another recommendation for a single-use product for some of the reasons that Mr. Lee brought up. Switching to supposed compostable materials presents new challenges to our was

Environment committee  Oh my goodness. There are so many things. I am also a mom who gets very anxious when I go grocery shopping, with all the plastic. My top items would be single-use coffee cups and lids, because we know they're so challenging to recycle and they are consistently found in the envir

Environment committee  According to the federal government's own assessment, there's nine billion dollars' worth of plastic pollution, plastic littered or plastic in landfill every year, which means that it is plastic that we are creating, using once most of the time and then disposing of. There's a hu

Environment committee  I'll jump in first, if that's okay. I agree. I think Canadians are smart enough to be able to understand this nuance. I also think that industry is smart enough to be able to understand this nuance. Industry has told us about the huge innovative capacity it has. We also know, a

Environment committee  No, it is a ubiquitous global environmental problem.

Environment committee  If you really want to get into the deep science I would recommend Dr. Chelsea Rochman, who already spoke to the committee. She is an expert in all the current and upcoming science demonstrating impacts that microplastics have on wildlife, fish and potentially even us. You broug

Environment committee  Microplastics can be ingested directly. Fish could ingest microplastics when they're eating something else. We could ingest microplastics by ingesting a fish that has microplastics in its tissue. We could also ingest microplastics directly from the air we breathe or the water we

Environment committee  Yes, I have read that study as well. What's happening is the plastics are breaking down into really small pieces. Nanoplastics are smaller than microplastics, and plastics were showing up in wild areas in the United States, for example, far away from civilization, suggesting that

Environment committee  There are a few reasons. In general, the way we have looked at this problem in the past has been as a kind of end-of-pipe solution. We already have a bathtub overflowing with water, so let's get a mop, but we're not willing to turn off the tap. Bans are an example of a way we co

Environment committee  I think plastic manufactured items absolutely meet the definition of toxic under CEPA. I'm not going to read the definition again because I know that Ms. Curran from the Environmental Law Centre at the University of Victoria already did that, but I want to reiterate that CEPA is

Environment committee  For more than half a century, the plastics industry has been touting recycling as the solution to our plastic pollution crisis, yet globally, only 9% of plastic waste has been recycled and 91% has ended up in the environment. That is 5.7 billion tonnes of plastic. It's a huge amo

Environment committee  Obviously, as I stated, other countries have already made progress on this issue. Only a couple already have their laws in place. The EU, for example, proposed their law in 2018 and it will be coming into force this summer, so this summer we'll start to see the real impacts of th

Environment committee  It's no problem. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me today to speak about this important issue. My name is Ashley Wallis, and I am the plastics campaigner at Oceana Canada. I am joined today by Oceana Canada's ex