Environment committee  Right now our cost of landfilling in Peel region is about $70 per tonne. That's maybe on the low end, but typical for landfilling costs in Ontario.

Environment committee  Right now we send about half of our waste to landfills, so about 250,000 tonnes. I'm not good at math, but if you multiply that by $70 it gives you a ballpark. It's a big number.

Environment committee  Yes, absolutely, they are. Whatever the government implements, as far as legislation and regulations, it has to be implemented in practice and must be practical. People need to understand what to do and what bin to put different packages and products into, and we need to be able

Environment committee  If compostable plastic products and alternatives like that end up in our blue box recycling facility, they'll probably end up as contamination in many other streams. Sorting is never perfect in these streams. For example, if you combine compostable plastic bags with fossil fuel p

Environment committee  They should be the same as any other producer responsibility program. They should be responsible for operating and funding the program to meet high targets.

Environment committee  That's going to drive demand for the recycled commodities to be collected and produced. One of the things is that there should be a minimum post-consumer amount in there to make sure that the materials that consumers put in the blue box get recycled back into products.

Environment committee  There are a couple of options from the municipal perspective. We're quite familiar with stimulus-type funding, where the federal, provincial and municipal governments all contribute, so we'd be in favour of those as long as all three parties agree. There are also direct grants,

Environment committee  Yes, I think it would. Certainly provincially it would help, and federally as well. It would help especially producers and organizations like the members that Mr. Goetz represents. They need scale to achieve some of their objectives and to pay for the investments they would have

Environment committee  I can give you the example in Ontario, and I think it could be a good example. The province would set targets for the collection of various materials and they would, of course, oversee and enforce us. The producers would have the ability to implement that and achieve those target

Environment committee  We have been tracking chemical recycling and other advanced recycling technologies over the past couple of years. They hold some promise or potential, but in practice they're still not there. We have worked with some other municipalities on some pilots to recycle plastics in the

Environment committee  The economy is a pretty big ship, and it takes a long time to turn it. While these things seem to happen very slowly, we are making progress in some regards. We are adding items to our recycling program to get them back into the circular economy. We're adding items to our green b

Environment committee  If there are harmonized EPR programs across each province or across the country with sufficiently high targets set for them, that will certainly help with the capture of these materials. However, I don't think it would be the full solution, because there are materials—items in th

Environment committee  Through Mr. Chair, I think I have all the questions down here, and if I've missed any, the member can ask again. As far as the resources are concerned, humans consume a lot of resources, and if we don't get those resources from our waste streams, we have to go back out to the f

Environment committee  There are many different approaches, especially in the blue box program, where individual municipalities are responsible for the design of the program and for deciding what goes in the blue box. That confuses residents when they travel from one municipality to the next. The same

Environment committee  I would agree with that. If a product is recyclable but is not accepted in enough places, they won't have the scale to attract the investment in the downstream processing. That's one of the reasons Peel supports producer responsibility, where producers would then be in control of